Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana

L,I i fLE ESSAYS

DRAWN FROM THE WRITINGS OF
GEORGE SANTAYANA

BY

LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH

WITH THE COLLABORATION OF THE AUTHOR

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER S SONS

First Published 1920
Second Impression 1921
Third Impression 1924
Fourth Impression 1931

Printed in Great Britain by R. & R. CI.ARK, LIMITED, Edinburgh.

PREFACE

THE origin and purpose of this book can be briefly stated.
Ever since I became acquainted with Mr. Santayana s
writings, I have been in the habit of taking up now and then
one or another of his volumes, finding in them, among many
things that, being no philosopher, I did not understand,
much writing like that of the older essayists on large human
subjects, which seemed to me more interesting and in many
ways more important than anything I found in the works
of other contemporary writers. I soon fell into the way of
copying out the passages that I liked, and thus I gradually
formed a collection of little essays on subjects of general
interest art and literature and religion, and the history
of the human mind as it has manifested itself at various
times and in the works of different men of genius. As
most of Mr. Santayana s books have not been reprinted
in England, and are hardly known to those on this side of
the Atlantic who might be interested in them, it occurred
to me that it might be worth while to print these little
essays. I asked Mr. Santayana if he would permit me to
do this, sending him my collection for his consideration
and possible approval. I sent it to him with some mis
giving, for I felt that it was rather an impertinent thing to
cut up the life-work of a distinguished philosopher into a
disconnected compilation of " elegant extracts." And then,
as I re-read with more careful attention the books from
which I had been making excerpts, I came to see that there

vi LITTLE ESSAYS

lay implicit in the material something of far greater signifi
cance, and that a much better use might be made of it. It
became clear to me that the estimations and criticisms I
had copied out were not mere personal and temperamental
insights, but were bound up with, and dependent upon,
a definite philosophy, a rational conception of the world
and man s allotted place in it, which gave them a unity
of interest and an importance far beyond that of any
mere utterances of miscellaneous appreciation any mere
"adventures of the soul." Mr. Santayana is by race and
temperament a representative of the Latin tradition : his
mind is a Catholic one ; it has been his aim to recon
struct our modern, miscellaneous, shattered picture of the
world, and to build, not of clouds, but of the materials
of this common earth, an edifice of thought, a fortress
or temple for the modern mind, in which every natural
impulse could find, if possible, its opportunity for satis
faction, and every ideal aspiration its shrine and altar.
It was from this edifice of Reason that I had been taking
the ornaments, and I now saw the much greater beauty
they would have if they could appear in their appropriate
setting. To sift, however, and rearrange these fragments,
to reconstruct out of them some image in miniature of
the original edifice from which I had detached them, was
not a task for me to undertake it could only be performed
by the architect of the original building. Fortunately
I succeeded in persuading Mr. Santayana to undertake
this task ; and while, therefore, the choice of these little
essays is largely mine, their titles and order and arrange
ment, and the changes and omissions which have been made
in the original texts are due, not to me, but to their author.

LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH.

CONTENTS

PART I

LITTLE ESSAYS ON HUMAN NATURE

PAGB

1. SPIRIT THE JUDGE 3

2. THE ORIGIN OF MORALS 4

3. IDEALS 5

4. INTELLECTUAL AMBITION 6

5. THE SUPPRESSED MADNESS OF SANE MEN . . 8

6. THE BIRTH OF REASON . . . 10

7. THE DIFFERENCE REASON MAKES . . .12

8. BODY AND MIND

9. THE SELF *9

10. SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, VANITY, AND FAME . . 20
n. FALSE MORAL PERSPECTIVES . , .24

12. PAIN 27

13. WHAT PEOPLE WILL PUT UP WITH . . .27

14. ADVANTAGE OF A LONG CHILDHOOD . . .28

15. THE TRANSITIVE FORCE OF KNOWLEDGE . . 29

1 6. KNOWLEDGE OF NATURE is SYMBOLIC ... 30

17. RELATIVITY OF SCIENCE 32

1 8. MATHEMATICS AND MORALS 33

19. MIND-READING 34

20. KNOWLEDGE OF CHARACTER 35

21. COMRADESHIP 37

22. LOVE 39

vii

viii LITTLE ESSAYS

PART II

LITTLE ESSAYS ON RELIGION

PAGE

23. IMAGINATIVE NATURE OF RELIGION 47

24. PROSAIC MISUNDERSTANDINGS . , . .51

25. THE HASTE TO BELIEVE 53

26. PATHETIC NOTIONS OF GOD . , . . .54

27. GREEK RELIGION 56

28. ORIGINAL CHRISTIAN FAITH 56

29. THE CONVERT 60

30. CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE A MORAL ALLEGORY . . 62

31. THE CHRISTIAN EPIC 67

32. PAGAN CUSTOM INFUSED INTO CHRISTIANITY . 73

33. CHRIST AND THE VIRGIN 76

34. ORTHODOXY AND HERESY 77

35. PROTESTANTISM 80

36. PIETY 83

37. SPIRITUALITY 86

38. PRAYER 88

39. THE FEAR OF DEATH 91

40. PSYCHIC PHENOMENA 93

41. A FUTURE LIFE 94

42. DISINTERESTED INTEREST IN LIFE ... 97

43. PLATONIC LOVE 100

44. IDEAL IMMORTALITY 102

PART III
LITTLE ESSAYS ON ART AND POETRY

45. JUSTIFICATION OF ART in

46. THE PLACE OF ART IN MORAL ECONOMY . .115

47. RARENESS OF ^ESTHETIC FEELING. . . .117

CONTENTS ix

PAGE

48. ART AND HAPPINESS 119

49. UTILITY AND BEAUTY . . . . . .119

50. GLIMPSES OF PERFECTION . . . . 123

51. MERE ART 125

52. COSTLINESS 125

53. THE STARS s . . .126

54. Music 129

55. THE ESSENCE OF LITERATURE . . . .138

56. THE NEED OF POETRY 139

57. POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY . . . . .140

58. THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY 144

59. POETRY AND PROSE 146

60. PRIMARY POETRY 149

61. THE SUPREME POET . . . . . .153

PART IV
LITTLE ESSAYS ON POETS AND PHILOSOPHERS

62. AGAINST PRYING BIOGRAPHERS . . . .159

63. THE DEARTH OF GREAT MEN . . . ..159

64. THE INTELLECT OUT OF FASHION. . . .163

65. ESSENCE AND EXISTENCE 165

66. MALICIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 168

67. ON ESSE EST PERCIPI . . . . . .169

68. KANT . . . . . . . . .170

69. TRANSCENDENTALISM 176

70. PRECARIOUS RATIONALISMS 178

71. UNJUST JUDGMENTS . . . . . .180

72. MODERN POETRY . . . . . . .182

73. THE UNHAPPINESS OF ARTISTS . . . . 184

74. POETRY OF LATIN PEOPLES . . . . - 186

75. DANTE 186

x LITTLE ESSAYS

PAGE

76. ABSENCE OF RELIGION IN SHAKESPEARE . .188

77. ROMANTIC IGNORANCE OF SELF . . . .190

78. THE BARBARIAN 191

79. ROMANTICISM 193

80. THE POLITICS OF FAUST . . . . .196

8 1. EMERSON 199

82. SHELLEY 203

83. BROWNING 206

84. NIETZSCHE 212

85. INTRINSIC VALUES 214

86. HEATHENISM . 215

PART V
LITTLE ESSAYS ON MATERIALISM AND MORALS

87. MORAL NEUTRALITY OF MATERIALISM . .223

88. VALUE IRRATIONAL 224

89. EMOTIONS OF THE MATERIALIST . . . .227

90. SADNESS OF NATURALISM 230

91. HAPPINESS IN DISILLUSION 234

92. THE TRUE PLACE OF MATERIALISM . . .235

93. INTUITIVE MORALITY ...... 237

94. RELATIVITY OF VALUES 240

95. AUTHORITY OF REASON IN MORALS . . .242

96. PLEASURE INGENUOUS 246

97. THE LOWER SENSES 247

98. PLEASURE AND CONSCIENCE .... 248

99. THE WORTH OF PLEASURES AND PAINS . . 249

100. THE VOLUPTUARY AND THE WORLDLING . .252

10 1. MORAL WAR 255

102. ORIGIN OF TYRANNY .,.,,. 259
103* WAR , . 260

CONTENTS xi

PAGE

104. PATRIOTISM . . . 2 3

105. INDUSTRIAL IDEALISM . . * 266

1 06. COLLECTIVISM .268

107. CHRISTIAN MORALITY .... .269

1 08. SUPERNATURALISM .273

109. POST-RATIONAL MORALITY . . . .275
no. THE NEED OF DISCIPLINE ....

in. HAPPINESS 2 7 8

112. DETACHMENT 28

113. THE PROFIT OF LIVING ..... 282

114. BEAUTY A HINT OF HAPPINESS . . .285

NOTE , 28 7

PART I

LITTLE ESSAYS ON HUMAN
NATURE

SPIRIT THE JUDGE

MAN has a prejudice against himself : anything which
is a product of his mind seems to him to be unreal or
comparatively insignificant. We are satisfied only when
we fancy ourselves surrounded by objects and laws inde
pendent of our nature. We have still to recognize in
practice that from our despised feelings the great world
of perception derives all its value. Things are interesting
because we care about them, and important because we
need them. Had our perceptions no connexion with our
pleasures, we should soon close our eyes on this world ;
if our intelligence were of no service to our passions, we
should come to doubt, in the lazy freedom of reverie,
whether two and two make four.

Yet so strong is the popular sense of the unworthiness
and insignificance of things purely emotional, that those
who have taken moral problems to heart and felt their
dignity have often been led into attempts to discover
some external right and beauty of which our moral
and aesthetic feelings should be perceptions or discoveries,
just as our intellectual activity is a perception or discovery
of external fact. These philosophers seem to feel that
unless moral and aesthetic judgments are expressions of
objective truth, and not merely expressions of human
nature, they stand condemned of hopeless triviality. A
judgment is not trivial, however, because it rests on human
feelings ; on the contrary, triviality consists in abstrac
tion from human interests, of which the knowledge of
truth is one, but one only ; and the human judgments and
opinions which are truly of little importance are those
that wander beyond the range of moral economy, or have

3

4 LITTLE ESSAYS

no function in ordering and enriching the mind. The
works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commen
taries they provoke.

2
THE ORIGIN OF MORALS

ANTHROPOLOGY is a matter-of-fact record of the habits
and passions of men. It is not the expression of any
ideal ; it does not specify any direction in which it demands
that things should move. Yet it describes the situation
which makes the existence of ideals possible and intelligible.
Given the propulsive energy of life in any animal that is
endowed with imagination, it is clear that whatever he
finds propitious to his endeavours he will call good, and
whatever he finds hostile to them he will call evil. His
various habits and passions will begin to judge one another.
A group of them called vanity, and another called taste,
and another called conscience, will arise within his breast.
Each of these groups, in so far as they have not coincided
or co-operated from the beginning, will tend to annex or
overcome the others. This competition between a man s
passions makes up his moral history, the growth of his
character, just as the competition of his ruling interests
with other interests at work in society makes up his out
ward career. The sort of imagination that can survey
all these interests at once, and can perceive how they
check or support one another, is called reason ; and when
ieason is vivid and powerful it gives courage and authority
to those interests which it sees are destined to success,
whilst it dampens or extinguishes those others which it
sees are destined to failure. Reason thus establishes a
sort of resigned and peaceful strength in the soul, founded
on renunciation ot what is impossible and co-operation
with what is necessary.

Sense and each of the passions suffers from its initial
independence. The disarray of human instincts lets
every spontaneous motion run too far ; life oscillates
between constraint and unreason. Morality too often
puts up with being a constraint and even imagines such

THE ORIGIN OF MORALS 5

a disgrace to be its essence. Art, on the contrary, as
often hugs unreason for fear of losing its inspiration, and
forgets that it is itself a rational principle of creation
and order. Morality is thus reduced to a necessary evil
and art to a vain good, all for want of harmony among
human impulses.

A creature like man, whose mode of being is a life or
experience and not a congealed ideality, such as eternal
truth might show, must find something to do ; he must
operate in an environment in which everything is not
already what he is presently to make it. If all ends were
already reached, and no art were requisite, life could not
exist at all, much less a life of reason. Our deepest interest
is after all to live, and we could not live if all acquisition,
assimilation, government, and creation had been made
impossible for us by their foregone realization, so that
every operation was forestalled by the given fact. The
distinction between the ideal and the real is one which
the human ideal itself insists should be preserved.

In the actual world this first condition of life is only
too amply fulfilled ; the present difficulty in man s estate,
the true danger to his vitality, lies not in want of work
but in so colossal a disproportion between demand and
opportunity that the ideal is stunned out of existence and
perishes for want of hope. The life of reason is continually
beaten back upon its animal sources, and nations are
submerged in deluge after deluge of barbarism.

3

IDEALS

IDEALS are not forces ; they are possible forms of being
that would frankly express the will. These forms are
invulnerable, eternal, and free ; and he who finds them
divine and congenial and is able to embody them at least
in part and for a season, has to that extent transfigured
life, turning it from a fatal process into a liberal art.

A supreme ideal of peace and perfection which moves
the lover, and which moves the sky, is more easily named

6 LITTLE ESSAYS

than understood. The value of the notion to a poet or
a philosopher does not lie in what it contains positively,
but in the attitude it expresses. To have an ideal does
not mean so much to have any image in the fancy, any
Utopia more or less articulate, as rather to take a con
sistent moral attitude towards all the things of this world,
to judge and coordinate our interests, to establish a hier
archy of goods and evils, and to value events and persons,
not by a casual personal impression or instinct, but accord
ing to their real nature and tendency. So understood, an
ultimate ideal is no mere vision of the philosophical dreamer,
but the goal of a powerful and passionate force in the
poet and the orator. It is the voice of his love or hate, of
his hope or sorrow, idealizing, challenging, or condemning
the world.

The ideal is itself a function of the reality and cannot
therefore be altogether out of harmony with the conditions
of its own birth and persistence. Civilization is precarious,
but it need not be short-lived. Its inception is already
a proof that there exists an equilibrium of forces which
is favourable to its existence ; and there is no reason
to suppose this equilibrium to be less stable than that
which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits.

4
INTELLECTUAL AMBITION

WHEN we consider the situation of the human mind in
nature, its limited plasticity and few channels of com
munication with the outer world, we need not wonder
that we grope for light, or that we find incoherence and
instability in human systems of ideas. The wonder rather
is that we have done so well, that in the chaos of sensations
and passions that fills the mind we have found any leisure
for self-concentration and reflection, and have succeeded
in gathering even a light harvest of experience from our
distracted labours. Our occasional madness is less wonder
ful than our occasional sanity. Relapses into dreams are
to be expected in a being whose brief existence is so like

INTELLECTUAL AMBITION 7

a dream ; but who could have been sure of this sturdy
and indomi able perseverance in the work of reason in
spite of all checks and discouragements ?

The resources of the mind are not commensurate with
its ambition. Of the five senses, three are of little use
in the formation of permanent notions : a fourth, sight,
is indeed vivid and luminous, but furnishes transcripts of
things so highly coloured and deeply modified by the
medium of sense, that a long labour of analysis and correc
tion is needed before satisfactory conceptions can be
extracted from it. For this labour, however, we are
endowed with the requisite instrument. We have memory
and we have certain powers of synthesis, abstraction,
reproduction, invention, in a word, we have understanding.
But this faculty of understanding has hardly begun its
work of deciphering the hieroglyphics of sense and framing
an idea of reality, when it is crossed by another faculty
the imagination. Perceptions do not remain in the mind,
as would be suggested by the trite simile of the seal and the
wax, passive and changeless, until time wear off their
sharp edges and make them fade. No, perceptions fall
into the brain rather as seeds into a furrowed field or
even as sparks into a keg of powder. Each image breeds
a hundred more, sometimes slowly and subterraneously,
sometimes (when a passionate train is started) with a
sudden burst of fancy. The mind, exercised by its own
fertility and flooded by its inner lights, has infinite trouble
to keep a true reckoning of its outward perceptions. It
turns from the frigid probl ms of observation to its own
visions ; it forgets to watch the courses of what should
be its " pilot stars." Indeed, were it not for the power
of convention in which, by a sort of mutual cancellation
of errors, the more practical and no mal conceptions
are enshrined, the imagination would carry men wholly
away, the best men first and the vulgar after them.
Even as it is, individuals and ages of fervid imagination
usually waste themselves in dreams, and must disappear
before the race, saddened and dazed, perhaps, by the
memory of those visions, can return to its plodding thoughts.

Five senses, then, to gather a small part of the infinite
influences that vibrate in nature, a moderate power of

8 LITTLE ESSAYS

understanding to interpret those senses, and an irregular,
passionate fancy to overlay that interpretation such
is the endowment of the human mind. And what is its
ambition ? Nothing less than to construct a picture
of all reality, to comprehend its own origin and that of
the universe, to discover the laws of both and prophesy
their destiny. Is not the disproportion enormous ? Are
not confusions and profound contradictions to be looked
for in an attempt to build so much out of so little ?

5

THE SUPPRESSED MADNESS OF SANE MEN

PERCEPTION is no primary phase of consciousness ; it is
an ulterior function acquired by a dream which has become
symbolic of its external conditions, and therefore relevant
to its own destiny. Such relevance and symbolism are
indirect and slowly acquired ; their status cannot be
understood unless we regard them as forms of imagination
happily grown significant. In imagination, not in per
ception, lies the substance of experience, while science and
reason are but its chastened and ultimate form.

Every actual animal is somewhat dull and somewhat
mad. He will at times miss his signals and stare vacantly
when he might well act, while at other times he will run
off into convulsions and raise a dust in his own brain to
no purpose. These imperfections are so human that we
should hardly recognize ourselves if we could shake them
off altogether. Not to retain any dulness would mean
to possess untiring attention and universal interests, thus
realizing the boast about deeming nothing human alien
to us ; while to be absolutely without folly would involve
perfect self-knowledge and self-control. The intelligent
man known to history flourishes within a dullard and
holds a lunatic in leash. He is encased in a protective
shell of ignorance and insensibility which keeps him from
being exhausted and confused by this too complicated
world ; but that integument blinds him at the same time
to many of his nearest and highest interests. He is amused

THE SUPPRESSED MADNESS OF SANE MEN 9

by the antics of the brute dreaming within his breast;
he gloats on his passionate reveries, an amusement which
sometimes costs him very dear. Thus the best human
intelligence is still decidedly barbarous ; it fights in heavy
armour and keeps a fool at court.

If consciousness could ever have the function of guiding
conduct better than instinct can, in the beginning it would
be most incompetent for that office. Only the routine
and equilibrium which healthy instinct involves keep
thought and will at all within the limits of sanity. The
predetermined interests we have as animals fortunately
focus our attention on practical things, pulling it back,
like a ball with an elastic cord, within the radius of pertinent
matters. Instinct alone compels us to neglect and seldom
to recall the irrelevant infinity of ideas. Philosophers
have sometimes said that all ideas come from experi
ence ; they never could have been poets and must have
forgotten that they were ever children. The great diffi
culty in education is to get experience out of ideas. Shame,
conscience, and reason continually disallow and ignore
what consciousness presents ; and what are they but
habit and latent instinct asserting themselves and forcing
us to disregard our midsummer madness ? Idiocy and
lunacy are merely reversions to a condition in which
present consciousness is in the ascendant and has escaped
the control of unconscious forces. We speak of people
being " out of their senses," when they have in fact fallen
back into them ; or of those who have " lost their mind,"
when they have lost merely that habitual control over
consciousness which prevented it from flaring into all
sorts of obsessions and agonies. Their bodies having
become deranged, their minds, far from correcting that
derangement, instantly share and betray it. A dream
is always simmering below the conventional surface of
speech and reflection. Even in the highest reaches and
serenest meditations of science it sometimes breaks through.
Even there we are seldom constant enough to conceive
a truly natural world ; somewhere passionate, fanciful,
or magic elements will slip into the scheme and baffle
rational ambition.

io LITTLE ESSAYS

6
THE BIRTH OF REASON

REASON was born, as it has since discovered, into a world
already wonderfully organized, in which it found its pre
cursor in what is called life, its seat in an animal body
of unusual plasticity, and its function in rendering the
volatile instincts and sensations in that body harmonious
with one another and with the outer world on which they
depend. Reason has thus supervened at the last stage
of an adaptation which had long been carried on by irra
tional and even unconscious processes. Nature preceded,
with all that fixation of impulses and conditions which
gives reason its tasks and its point d appui.

The guide in early sensuous education is the same
that conducts the whole life of reason, namely, impulse
checked by experiment, and experiment judged again by
impulse. What teaches the child to distinguish the
nurse s breast from sundry blank or disquieting presences ?
What induces him to arrest that image, to mark its associ
ates, and to recognize them with alacrity ? The dis
comfort of its absence and the comfort of its possession.
To that image is attached the chief satisfaction he knows,
and the force of that satisfaction disentangles it before
all other images from the feeble and fluid continuum of
his life. What first awakens in him a sense of reality is
what first is able to appease his unrest. Impulses to
appropriate and to reject first teach us the points of the
compass, and space itself, like charity, begins at home.

In order to begin at the beginning in the autobiography
of mind, we must try to fall back on uninterpreted feeling,
as the mystics aspire to do. We need not expect, however,
to find peace there, for the immediate is in flux. It is
not God but chaos ; its nothingness is pregnant, restless,
and brutish ; it is that from which all our ideas of things
emerge in so far as they have any permanence or value,
so that to lapse into it again is a dull suicide and no salva
tion. Peace, which is after all what the mystic seeks,
lies not in indistinction but in perfection. If he reaches

THE BIRTH OF REASON n

it in a measure himself, it is by the traditional discipline
he still practises, not by his heats or his languors. The
perturbed immediate finds or at least seeks its peace in
reason, through which it comes in sight of some sort of
ideal permanence. When the material flux manages to
form an eddy and to maintain by breathing and nutrition
what we call a life, it affords some slight foothold and
object for thought and becomes in a measure like the ark in
the desert, a moving habitation for the eternal. Life begins
to have some value and continuity so soon as there is some
thing definite that lives and something definite to live for.
The primacy of impulses, irrational in themselves but
expressive of bodily functions, is observable in the behaviour
of animals, and in those dreams, obsessions, and primary
passions which in the midst of sophisticated life some
times lay bare the obscure groundwork of human nature.
Reason s work is there undone. We can observe sporadic
growths, disjointed fragments of rationality, springing
up in a moral wilderness. In the passion of love, for
instance, a cause unknown to the sufferer, but which is
doubtless the spring-flood of hereditary instincts acci
dentally let loose, suddenly checks the young man s gaiety,
dispels his random curiosity, arrests perhaps his very
breath ; and when he looks for a cause to explain his
suspended faculties, he can find it only in the presence
or image of another being, of whose character, possibly, he
knows nothing and whose beauty may not be remarkable ;
yet that image pursues him everywhere, and he is dominated
by an unaccustomed tragic earnestness and a new capacity
for suffering and joy. If the passion be strong there is
no previous interest or duty that will be remembered
before it ; if it be lasting the whole life may be reorganized
by it ; it may impose new habits, other manners, and
another religion. Yet what is the root of all this idealism ?
An irrational instinct, normally intermittent, such as all
dumb creatures share, which has here managed to dominate
a human soul and to enlist all the mental powers in its
more or less permanent service, upsetting their usual
equilibrium. This madness, however, inspires method ;
and for the first time, perhaps, in his life, the man has
something to live for. The blind affinity that like a

12 LITTLE ESSAYS

magnet draws all the faculties round it, in so uniting
them, suffuses them with an unwonted spiritual light.

Here, on a small scale and on a precarious foundation,
we may see clearly illustrated and foreshadowed that life
of reason which is simply the unity given to all existence
by a mind in love with the good. In the higher reaches
of human nature, as much as in the lower, rationality
depends on distinguishing the excellent ; and that dis
tinction can be made, in the last analysis, only by an irra
tional impulse. As life is a better form given to force,
by which the universal flux is subdued to create and
serve a somewhat permanent interest, so reason is a better
form given to interest itself, by which it is fortified and
propagated, and ultimately, perhaps, assured of satisfac
tion. The substance to which this form is given remains
irrational ; so that rationality, like all excellence, is
something secondary and relative, requiring a natural
being to possess or to impute it. When definite interests
are recognized and the values of things are estimated by
that standard, action at the same time veering in harmony
with that estimation, then reason has been born and a
moral world has arisen.

7
THE DIFFERENCE REASON MAKES

IF a dog, while sniffing about contentedly, sees afar off
his master arriving after long absence, a new circle of
sensations appears, with a new principle governing interest
and desire ; instead of waywardness subjection, instead
of freedom love. But the poor brute asks for no reason
why his master went, why he has come again, why he
should be loved, or why presently while lying at his feet
you forget him and begin to grunt and dream of the chase
all that is an utter mystery, utterly unconsidered.
Such experience has variety, scenery, and a certain vital
rhythm ; its story might be told in dithyrambic verse.
It moves wholly by inspiration ; every event is pro
vidential, every act unpremeditated. Absolute freedom
and absolute helplessness have met together : you depend

THE DIFFERENCE REASON MAKES 13

wholly on divine favour, yet that unfathomable agency
is not distinguishable from your own life. This is the
condition to which some forms of piety invite men to
return ; and it lies in truth not far beneath the level of
ordinary human consciousness.

Systematic living is after all an experiment, as is the
formation of animal bodies, and the inorganic pulp out
of which these growths have come may very likely have
had its own incommunicable values, its absolute thrills,
which we vainly try to remember and to which, in moments
of dissolution, we may half revert. Protoplasmic pleasures
and strains may be the substance of consciousness ; and
as matter seeks its own level, and as the sea and the flat
waste to which all dust returns have a certain primordial
life and a certain sublimity, so all passions and ideas,
when spent, may rejoin the basal note of feeling, and
enlarge their volume as they lose their form. This loss of
form may not be unwelcome, if it is the formless that,
by anticipation, speaks through what is surrendering its
being. Though to acquire or impart form is delightful
in art, in thought in generation, in government, yet a
euthanasia of finitude is also known. All is not affecta
tion in the poet who says, " Now more than ever seems
it rich to die " ; and, without any poetry or affectation,
men may love sleep, and opiates, and every luxurious
escape from humanity.

The path of reason is only one of innumerable courses
perhaps open to existence, but it is the only one that
human discourse is competent to trace. Madness, if
pronounced, is precarious, but when speculative enough
to be harmless or not deep enough to be debilitating,
it may last for ever.

An imaginative life may therefore exist parasitically
in a man, hardly touching his action or environment.
There is no possibility of exorcizing these apparitions by
their own power. A nightmare does not dispel itself ; it
endures until the organic strain which caused it is relaxed
either by natural exhaustion or by some external influence.
Therefore human ideas are still for the most part sensuous
and trivial, shifting with the chance currents of the brain,
and representing nothing, so to speak, but personal tern-

14 LITTLE ESSAYS

perature. Personal temperature, moreover, is sometimes
tropical. There are brains like a South American jungle,
as there are others like an Arabian desert, strewn with
nothing but bones. While a passionate sultriness prevails
in the mind there is no end to its luxuriance. Languages
intricately articulate, flaming mythologies, metaphysical
perspectives lost in infinity, arise in remarkable profusion.
In time, however, there comes a change of climate and the
whole forest disappears.

It is easy, from the standpoint of acquired practical
competence, to deride a merely imaginative life. Derision,
however, is not interpretation, and the better method of
overcoming erratic ideas is to trace them out dialectically
and see if they will not recognize their own fatuity. The
most irresponsible vision has certain principles of order
and valuation by which it estimates itself ; and in these
principles the life of reason is already broached, however
halting may be its development. We should lead our
selves out of our dream, as the Israelites were led out of
Egypt, by the promise and eloquence of that dream itself.
Otherwise we might kill the goose that lays the golden
egg, and by proscribing imagination abolish science.

Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, said a poet
who stood near enough to fundamental human needs,
and to the great answer which art and civilization can
make to them, to value the life of reason and think it
sublime. To discern causes is to turn vision into know
ledge and motion into action. It is to fix the associates
of things so that their respective transformations are col
lated, and they become significant of one another. The
calm places in life are filled with power and the spasms
with resource. No emotion can overwhelm the mind,
for of none is the basis or issue wholly hidden ; no event
can disconcert it altogether, because it sees beyond. Means
can be looked for to escape from the worst predicament ;
and whereas each moment had been formerly filled with
nothing but its own adventure and surprised emotion,
each now makes room for the lesson of what went before
and surmises what may be the plot of the whole.

BODY AND MIND 15

8
BODY AND MIND

NOTHING is more natural than that animals should feel
and think. The relation of mind to body, of reason to
nature, seems to be actually this : when bodies have
reached a certain complexity and vital equilibrium, a sense
begins to inhabit them which is focussed upon the pre
servation of that body and on its reproduction. To
separate things so closely bound together as are mind and
body, reason and nature, is a violent and artificial divorce,
and a man of judgment will instinctively discredit any
philosophy in which it is decreed. But to avoid divorce it
is well first to avoid unnatural unions, and not to attribute
to our two elements, which must be partners for life,
relations repugnant to their respective natures and offices.
Now the body is an instrument, the mind its function,
the witness and reward of its operation. Mind is the
entelechy of the body, a value which accrues to the body
when it has reached a certain perfection, of which it would
be a pity, so to speak, that it should remain unconscious ;
so that while the body feeds the mind the mind perfects
the body, lifting it and all its natural relations and impulses
into the moral world, into the sphere of interests and ideas.
No connexion could be closer than this reciprocal
involution, as nature and life reveal it ; but the connexion
is natural, not dialectical. The union will be denaturalized
and, so far as philosophy goes, actually destroyed, if we
seek to carry it on into logical equivalence. If we isolate
the terms mind and body and study the inward implica
tions of each apart, we shall never discover the other.
That matter cannot, by transposition of its particles,
become what we call consciousness, is an admitted truth ;
that mind cannot become its own occasions or determine
its own march, though it be a truth not recognized by all
philosophers, is in itself no less obvious. Matter, dialectic-
ally studied, makes consciousness seem a superfluous
and unaccountable addendum ; mind, studied in the
same way, makes nature an embarrassing idea, a figment

16 LITTLE ESSAYS

which ought to be subservient to conscious aims and
perfectly transparent, but which remains opaque and
overwhelming. In order to escape these sophistications,
it suffices to revert to immediate observation and state
the question in its proper terms : nature lives, and per
ception is a private echo and response to ambient motions.
The mind gives voice to the impulses of the body ; at
their behest a man defines the world that sustains him
and that conditions all his satisfactions. In discerning
his origin he christens Nature by the eloquent name of
mother, under which title she enters the universe of dis
course. Simultaneously he discerns his own existence
and marks off the inner region of his dreams. And it
behooves him not to obliterate these discoveries. By trying
to give his mind false points of attachment in nature
he would disfigure not only nature but also that reason
which is so much the essence of his life.

Consciousness, then, is the expression of bodily life
and the seat of all its values. Its place in the natural
world is like that of its own ideal products, art, religion,
or science ; it translates natural relations into synthetic
and ideal symbols by which things are interpreted with
reference to the interests of consciousness itself. This
representation is also an existence and has its place along
with all other existences in the bosom of nature. In this
sense its connexion with its organs, and with all that affects
the body or that the body affects, is a natural connexion.
If the word cause did not suggest dialectical bonds we
might innocently say that thought was a link in the chain
of natural causes. It is at least a link in the chain
of natural events ; for it has determinate antecedents
in the brain and senses and determinate consequents in
actions and words. But this dependence and this efficacy
have nothing logical about them ; they are habitual
collocations in the world, like lightning and thunder.

Whether consciousness accompanies vegetative life, or
even all motion, is a point to be decided solely by empiri
cal analogy. When the exact physical conditions of
thought are discovered in man, we may infer how far
thought is diffused through the universe, for it will be
coextensive with the conditions it will have been shown

BODY AND MIND 17

to have. Now, in a very rough way, we know already what
these conditions are. They are first the existence of an
organic body and then its possession of adaptable instincts,
of instincts that can be modified by experience. This
capacity is what an observer calls intelligence ; docility
is the observable half of reason. When an animal winces
at a blow and readjusts his pose, we say he feels ; and
we say he thinks when we see him brooding over his im
pressions, and find him launching into a new course of
action after a silent decoction of his potential impulses.
Conversely, when observation covers both the mental and
the physical process, that is, in our own experience, we
find that felt impulses, the conceived objects for which they
make, and the values they determine are all correlated
with animal instincts and external impressions. A desire
is the inward sign of a physical proclivity to act, an image
in sense is the sign in most cases of some material object
in the environment and always, we may presume, of some
cerebral change. The brain seems to simmer like a caldron
in which all sorts of matters are perpetually transforming
themselves into all sorts of shapes. When this cerebral
reorganization is pertinent to the external situation and
renders the man, when he resumes action, more a master
of his world, the accompanying thought is said to be
practical ; for it brings a consciousness of power and an
earnest of success.

Cerebral processes are of course largely hypothetical.
Theory suggests their existence, and experience can verify
that theory only in an indirect and imperfect manner.
The addition of a physical substratum to all thinking
is only a scientific expedient, a hypothesis expressing the
faith that nature is mechanically intelligible even beyond
the reaches of minute verification. On the other hand,
to add a mental phase to every part and motion of the
cosmos is an audacious fancy. It violates all empirical
analogy, for the phenomenon which feeling accompanies
in crude experience is not mere material existence, but
reactive organization and docility.

The limits set to observation, however, render the
mental and material spheres far from coincident, and even
in a rough way mutually supplementary, so that human

c

i8 LITTLE ESSAYS

reflection has fallen into a habit of interlarding them.
The world, instead of being a living body, a natural system
with moral functions, has seemed to be a bisectible hybrid,
half material and half mental, the clumsy conjunction
of an automaton with a ghost. If philosophers of the
Cartesian school had taken to heart, as the German trans-
cendentalists did, the cogito ergo sum of their master,
and had considered that a physical world is, for knowledge,
nothing but an instrument to explain sensations and their
order, they might have expected the collapse of half their
metaphysics at the approach of their positive science :
for if mental existence was to be kept standing only by
its supposed causal efficacy nothing could prevent the
whole world from becoming presently a bete machine.
Psychic events have no links save through their organs
and their objects ; the function of the material world is,
indeed, precisely to supply their linkage. The internal
relations of ideas, on the other hand, are dialectical ; their
realm is eternal and absolutely irrelevant to the march
of events. If we must speak, therefore, of causal relations
between mind and body, we should say that matter is the
pervasive cause of the distribution of mind, and mind the
pervasive cause of the discovery and value of matter. To
ask for an efficient cause, to trace back a force or investigate
origins, is to have already turned one s face in the direction
of matter and mechanical laws : no success in that under
taking can fail to be a triumph for materialism. To ask
for a justification, on the other hand, is to turn no less
resolutely in the direction of ideal results and actualities
from which instrumentality and further use have been
eliminated. Spirit is useless, being the end of things :
but it is not vain, since it alone rescues all else from vanity.
It is called practical when it is prophetic of its own better
fulfilments, which is the case whenever forces are being
turned to good uses, whenever an organism is exploring
its relations and putting forth new tentacles with which to
grasp the world.

THE SELF 19

9
THE SELF

WHAT we call ourselves is a certain cycle of vegetative
processes, bringing a round of familiar impulses and ideas ;
this stream has a general direction, a conscious vital inertia,
in harmony with which it moves. Many of the develop
ments within it are dialectical ; that is, they go forward
by inner necessity, like an egg hatching within its shell,
warmed but undisturbed by an environment of which
they are wholly oblivious ; and this sort of growth, when
there is adequate consciousness of it, is felt to be both
absolutely obvious and absolutely free. The emotion
that accompanies it is pleasurable, but is too active and
proud to call itself a pleasure ; it has rather the quality
of assurance and right. This part of life, however, is only
its courageous core ; about it play all sorts of incidental
processes, allying themselves to it in more or less congruous
movement. Whatever peripheral events fall in with the
central impulse are lost in its energy and felt to be not
so much peripheral and accidental as inwardly grounded,
being, like the stages of a prosperous dialectic, spontaneously
demanded and instantly justified when they come.

Man is as full of potentiality as he is of impotence.
A will in harmony with many active forces, and skilful in
divination and augury, may long profess to be almighty
without being contradicted by the event. The sphere
of the self s power is accordingly, for primitive estimation,
simply the sphere of what happens well ; it is the entire
unoffending and obedient part of the world. A man who
has good luck at dice prides himself upon it, and believes
that to have it is his destiny and desert. If his luck
were absolutely constant, he would say he had the power
to throw high ; and as the event would, by hypothesis,
sustain his boast, there would be no practical error in that
assumption. A will that never found anything to thwart
it would think itself omnipotent ; and as the psychological
essence of omniscience is not to suspect there is anything
which you do not know, so the psychological essence of
omnipotence is not to suspect that anything can happen

20 LITTLE ESSAYS

which you do not desire. Such claims would undoubtedly
be made if experience lent them the least colour ; but
would even the most comfortable and innocent assurances
of this sort cease to be precarious ? Might not any moment
of eternity bring the unimagined contradiction, and shake
the dreaming god ?

10
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, VANITY, AND FAME

IDEAL society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagina
tion. Its personages are all mythical, beginning with
that brave protagonist who calls himself I and speaks all
the soliloquies. When most nearly material these per
sonages are human souls the ideal life of particular
bodies or floating mortal reputations echoes of those
ideal lives in one another. From this relative substanti
ality they fade into notions of country, posterity, humanity,
and the gods. These figures all represent some circle
of events or forces in the real world ; but such repre
sentation, besides being mythical, is usually most inade
quate. The boundaries of that province which each spirit
presides over are vaguely drawn, the spirit itself being
correspondingly indefinite. This ambiguity is most con
spicuous, perhaps, in the most absorbing of the personages
which a man constructs in this imaginative fashion his
idea of himself. " There is society where none intrudes " ;
and for most men sympathy with their imaginary selves
is a powerful and dominant emotion. True memory offers
but a meagre and interrupted vista of past experience,
yet even that picture is far too rich a term for mental
discourse to bandy about ; a name with a few physical
and social connotations is what must represent the man
to his own thinkings. Or rather it is no memory, however
eviscerated, that fulfils that office. A man s notion of
himself is a figment in discourse for which his more con
stant bodily feelings, his ruling interests, and his social
relations furnish most of the substance.

The more reflective and self-conscious a man is the
more completely will his experience be subsumed and
absorbed in his perennial "I." If philosophy has come

SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, VANITY, AND FAME 21

to reinforce this reflective egotism, he may even regard
all nature as nothing but his half-voluntary dream and
encourage himself thereby to give even to the physical
world a dramatic and sentimental colour. But the more
successful he is in stuffing everything into his self-con
sciousness, the more desolate will the void become which
surrounds him. For self is, after all, but one term in a
primitive dichotomy and would lose its specific and intimate
character were it no longer contrasted with anything else.
The egoist must therefore people the desert he has spread
about him, and he naturally peoples it with mythical
counterparts of himself. Sometimes, if his imagination
is sensuous, his alter-egos are incarnate in the landscape,
and he creates a poetic mythology ; sometimes, when
the inner life predominates, they are projected into his
own forgotten past or infinite future. He will then say
that all experience is really his own and that some inex
plicable illusion has momentarily raised opaque partitions
in his omniscient mind.

Philosophers less pretentious and more worldly than
these have sometimes felt, in their way, the absorbing
force of self-consciousness. La Rochefoucauld could de
scribe amour propre as the spring of all human senti
ments. Amour propre involves preoccupation not merely
with the idea of self, but with that idea reproduced in
other men s minds ; the soliloquy has become a dialogue,
or rather a solo with an echoing chorus. Interest in one s
own social figure is to some extent a material interest,
for other men s love or aversion is a principle read into
their acts ; and a social animal like man is dependent
on other men s acts for his happiness. An individual s
concern for the attitude society takes toward him is there
fore in the first instance concern for his own practical
welfare. But imagination here refines upon worldly
interest. What others think of us would be of little
moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what
we think of ourselves. Nothing could better prove the
mythical character of self-consciousness than this extreme
sensitiveness to alien opinions ; for if a man really knew
himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions
others might form on a subject in which he had such

22 LITTLE ESSAYS

matchless opportunities for observation. Indeed, those
opinions would hardly seem to him directed upon the
reality at all, and he would laugh at them as he might at
the stock fortune-telling of some itinerant gypsy.

As it is, however, the least breath of irresponsible
and anonymous censure lashes our self-esteem and some
times quite transforms our plans and affections. The
passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate ;
they are green and vigorous in old age. We crave support
in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contra
dictions in that sphere ; for however persistent and
passionate such prejudices may be, we know too well that
they are woven of thin air. A hostile word, by starting
a contrary imaginative current, buffets them rudely and
threatens to dissolve their being.

The highest form of vanity is love of fame. It is a
passion easy to deride but hard to understand, and in men
who live at all by imagination almost impossible to eradicate.
The good opinion of posterity can have no possible effect
on our fortunes, and the practical value which reputation
may temporarily have is quite absent in posthumous
fame. The direct object of this passion that a name
should survive in men s mouths to which no adequate
idea of its original can be attached seems a thin and
fantastic satisfaction, especially when we consider how
little we should probably sympathize with the creatures
that are to remember us. What comfort would it be to
Virgil that boys still read him at school, or to Pindar that
he is sometimes mentioned in a world from which every
thing he loved has departed ? Yet, beneath this desire for
nominal longevity, apparently so inane, there may lurk an
ideal ambition of which the ancients cannot have been uncon
scious when they set so high a value on fame. They often
identified fame with immortality, a subject on which they
had far more rational sentiments than have since prevailed.

Fame, as a noble mind conceives and desires it, is not
embodied in a monument, a biography, or the repetition
of a strange name by strangers ; it consists in the im
mortality of a man s work, his spirit, his efficacy, in the
perpetual rejuvenation of his soul in the world. When
Horace no model of magnanimity wrote his exegi

SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, VANITY, AND FAME 23

monumentum, he was not thinking that the pleasure he
would continue to give would remind people of his trivial
personality, which indeed he never particularly celebrated
and which had much better lie buried with his bones.
He was thinking, of course, of that pleasure itself ; think
ing that the delight, half lyric, half sarcastic, which those
delicate cameos had given him to carve would be per
ennially renewed in all who retraced them. Nay, perhaps
we may not go too far in saying that even that impersonal
satisfaction was not the deepest he felt ; the deepest,
very likely, flowed from the immortality, not of his monu
ment, but of the subject and passion it commemorated ;
that tenderness, I mean, and that disillusion with mortal
life which rendered his verse immortal. He had expressed,
and in expressing appropriated, some recurring human
moods, some mocking renunciations ; and he knew that
his spirit was immortal, being linked and identified with
that portion of the truth. He had become a little spokes
man of humanity, uttering what all experience repeats
more or less articulately ; and even if he should cease
to be honoured in men s memories, he would continue
to be unwittingly honoured and justified in their lives.

What we may conceive to have come in this way even
within the apprehension of Horace is undoubtedly what
has attached many nobler souls to fame. With an inver
sion of moral derivations which all mythical expression
involves we speak of fame as the reward of genius, whereas
in truth genius, the imaginative dominion over experience, is
its own reward and fame is but a foolish image by which
its worth is symbolized. When the Virgin in the Magnificat
says, " Behold, from henceforth all generations shall call
me blessed," the psalmist surely means to express a spiritual
exaltation exempt from vanity ; he merely translates
into a rhetorical figure the fact that what had been first
revealed to Mary would also bless all generations. That
the church should in consequence deem and pronounce
her blessed is an incident describing, but not creating,
the unanimity in their religious joys. Fame is thus the
outward sign or recognition of an inward representative
authority residing in genius or good fortune, an authority
in which lies the whole worth of fame. Those will sub-

24 LITTLE ESSAYS

stantially remember and honour us who keep our ideals,
and we shall live on in those ages whose experience we have
anticipated.

ii
FALSE MORAL PERSPECTIVES

SEA-SICKNESS and child-birth when they are over, the
pangs of despised love when that love is dead or requited,
the travail of sin when once salvation is assured, all melt
away and dissolve like a morning mist leaving a clear
sky without a vestige of sorrow. So also with merely
remembered and not reproducible pleasures ; the buoyancy
of youth, when absurdity was not yet tedious, the rapture
of sport or passion, the immense peace found in a mystical
surrender to the universal, all these generous ardours count
for nothing when they are once gone. The memory of
them cannot cure a fit of the blues nor raise an irritable
mortal above some petty act of malice or vengeance, or
reconcile him to foul weather. An ode of Horace, on the
other hand, a scientific monograph, or a well-written
page of music is a better antidote to melancholy than
thinking on all the happiness which one s own life or that
of the universe may ever have contained. Why should
overwhelming masses of suffering and joy affect imagina
tion so little while it responds sympathetically to aesthetic
and intellectual irritants of very slight intensity, objects
that, it must be confessed, are of almost no importance to the
welfare of mankind ? Why should we be so easily awed
by artistic genius and exalt men whose works we know
only by name, perhaps, and whose influence upon society
has been infinitesimal, like a Pindar or a Leonardo, while
we regard great merchants and inventors as ignoble
creatures in comparison ? There is a prodigious selfish
ness in dreams : they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable
amid the cries of the real world.

Utilitarians have attempted to show that the human
conscience commends precisely those actions which tend
to secure general happiness and that the notions of justice
and virtue prevailing in any age vary with its social economy
and the prizes it is able to attain. And, if due allowance

FALSE MORAL PERSPECTIVES 25

is made for the complexity of the subject, we may reason
ably admit that the precepts of obligatory morality bear
this relation to the general welfare ; thus virtue means
courage in a soldier, probity in a merchant, and chastity
in a woman. But if we turn from the morality required
of all to the type regarded as perfect and ideal, we find
no such correspondence to the benefits involved. The
selfish imagination intervenes here and attributes an
absolute and irrational value to those figures that entertain
it with the most absorbing and dreamful emotions. The
character of Christ, for instance, which even the least
orthodox among us are in the habit of holding up as a
perfect model, is not the character of a benefactor but of
a martyr, a spirit from a higher world lacerated in its
passage through this uncomprehending and perverse
existence, healing and forgiving out of sheer compassion,
sustained by his inner affinities to the supernatural, and
absolutely disenchanted with all earthly or political goods.
Christ did not suffer, like Prometheus, for having bestowed
or wished to bestow any earthly blessing : the only
blessing he bequeathed was the image of himself upon
the cross, whereby men might be comforted in their
own sorrows, rebuked in their worldliness, driven to put
their trust in the supernatural, and united, by their
common indifference to the world, in one mystic brother
hood. As men learned these lessons, or were inwardly
ready to learn them, they recognized more and more clearly
in Jesus their heaven-sent redeemer, and in following their
own conscience and desperate idealism into the desert or
the cloister, in ignoring all civic virtues and allowing the
wealth, art, and knowledge of the pagan world to decay,
they began what they felt to be an imitation of Christ.

It appears that the great figures of art or religion,
together with all historic and imaginative ideals, advance
insensibly on the values they represent. The image
has more lustre than the original, and is often the more
important and influential fact. A memorable thing, people
say in their eulogies, little thinking to touch the ground
of their praise. For things are called great because they
are memorable, they are not remembered because they
were great. Fortunate indeed was Achilles that Homer

26 LITTLE ESSAYS

sang of him, and fortunate the poets that make a public
titillation out of their sorrows and ignorance. The favours
of memory are extended to those feeble realities and denied
to the massive substance of daily experience. When life
dies, when what was present becomes a memory, its ghost
flits still among the living, feared or worshipped not for
the experience it once possessed but for the aspect it now
wears. Yet this injustice in representation, specula tively
so offensive, is practically excusable ; for it is in one
sense right and useful that all things, whatever their
original or inherent dignity, should be valued at each
moment only by their present function and utility.

The error involved in attributing values to the past
is naturally aggravated when values are to be assigned
to the future. In this case imagination cannot be con
trolled by circumstantial evidence, and is consequently
the only basis for judgment. But as the conception of
a thing naturally evokes an emotion different from that
involved in its presence, ideals of what is desirable for
the future contain no warrant that the experience desired
would, when actual, prove to be acceptable and good. An
ideal carries no extrinsic assurance that its realization
would be a benefit. To convince ourselves that an ideal
has rational authority and represents a better experience
than the actual condition it is contrasted with, we must
control the prophetic image by as many circumlocutions
as possible. We must buttress or modify our spontaneous
judgment with all the other judgments that the object
envisaged can prompt. The possible error remains even
then ; but a practical mind will always accept the risk
of error when it has made every possible correction. The
rationality possible to the will lies not in its source but
in its method. An ideal cannot wait for its realization to
prove its validity. To deserve allegiance it needs only
to express completely what the soul at present demands,
and to do justice to all extant interests. That life is
worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and,
were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
Experience by its dead weight of joy and sorrow can
neither inspire nor prevent enthusiasm ; only a living ideal
will avail to attract the will and, if realized, to satisfy it.

WHAT PEOPLE WILL PUT UP WITH 27

12

PAIN

THE utility of pain lies in the warning it gives : in
trying to escape pain we escape destruction. That we
desire to escape pain is certain ; its very definition can
hardly go beyond the statement that pain is that element
of feeling which we seek to abolish on account of its intrinsic
quality. That this desire, however, should know how to
initiate remedial action is a notion contrary to experience
and in itself unthinkable. If pain could have cured us
we should long ago have been saved. The bitterest
quintessence of pain is its helplessness, and our incapacity
to abolish it. The most intolerable torments are those
we feel gaining upon us, intensifying and prolonging them
selves indefinitely. This baffling quality, so conspicuous
in extreme agony, is present in all pain and is perhaps its
essence. If we sought to describe by a circumlocution
what is of course a primary sensation, we might scarcely
do better than to say that pain is consciousness at once
intense and empty, fixing attention on what contains no
character, and arrests all satisfactions without offering
anything in exchange. The horror of pain lies in its
intolerable intensity and its intolerable tedium. It can
accordingly be cured either by sleep or by entertainment.
In itself it has no resource ; its violence is quite helpless
and its vacancy offers no expedients by which it might
be unknotted and relieved.

13
WHAT PEOPLE WILL PUT UP WITH

THERE is nothing to which men, while they have food
and drink, cannot reconcile themselves. They will put
up with present suffering, with the certainty of death,
with solitude, with shame, with wrong, with the expecta
tion of eternal damnation. In the face of such things,

28 LITTLE ESSAYS

they can not only be merry for the moment, but solemnly
thank God for having brought them into existence. Habit
is stronger than reason, and the respect for fact stronger
than the respect for the ideal ; nor would the ideal and
reason ever prevail did they not make up in persistence
what they lack in momentary energy.

14
ADVANTAGE OF A LONG CHILDHOOD

HAD all intelligence been developed in the womb, as it
might have been, nothing essential could have been learned
afterwards. Mankind would have contained nothing
but doctrinaires, and the arts would have stood still for
ever. Those human races which are most precocious
are most incorrigible and, while they seem the cleverest
at first, prove ultimately the least intelligent. In some
nations everybody is by nature so astute, versatile, and
sympathetic that education hardly makes any difference
in manners or mind ; and it is there precisely that genera
tion follows generation without essential progress, and
no one ever remakes himself on a better plan. Structure
preformed is formed blindly ; the a priori is as dangerous
in life as in philosophy. Only the cruel workings of com
pulsion and extermination keep what is spontaneous in
any creature harmonious with the world it is called to
live in. Nothing but casual variations could permanently
improve such a creature ; and casual variations will seldom
improve it.

To be born half-made is an immense advantage. If
experience can co-operate in forming instincts, and if
human nature can be partly a work of art, mastery can
be carried quickly to much greater lengths. This is the
secret of man s pre-eminence. His liquid brain is unfit
for years to control action advantageously. He has an
age of play which is his apprenticeship ; and he is formed
unawares by a series of selective experiments, of curious
gropings, while he is still under tutelage and suffers little
by his mistakes. It is perhaps the duller races, with a

ADVANTAGE OF A LONG CHILDHOOD 29

long childhood and a brooding mind, that bear the hopes
of the world within them, if only nature avails to execute
what she has planned on so great a scale.

15
THE TRANSITIVE FORCE OF KNOWLEDGE

INTELLIGENCE is no compulsory possession ; and while
some of us would gladly have more of it, others find that
they already have too much. The tension of thought
distresses them and to represent what they cannot and
would not be is not a natural function of their spirit. But
knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour
and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of
something absent ; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
Consciousness is the least ideal of things when reason is
taken out of it, and we cannot cease to think and still
continue to know. What you call the evidence of sense
is pure confidence in reason. You would not be so idiotic
as to see no meaning in your sensations ; you will not
pin your faith so unimaginatively on momentary appear
ance as to deny that the world exists when you stop think
ing about it. You feel that your intellect has wider scope
and has discovered many a thing that goes on behind
the scenes, many a secret that would escape a stupid and
gaping observation. It is the fool that looks to look
and stops at the barely visible : you not only look but
see ; for you understand. And intelligence loves to
perceive ; water is not more grateful to a parched throat
than a principle of comprehension to a confused under
standing. Intelligence is most at home in the ultimate,
which is the object of intent. Those realities which it
can trust and continually recover are its familiar and
beloved companions. The mists that may originally
have divided it from them, and which psychologists call
the mind, are gladly forgotten so soon as intelligence avails
to pierce them, and as friendly communication can be
established with the real world.

30 LITTLE ESSAYS

16
KNOWLEDGE OF NATURE IS SYMBOLIC

THE life of reason is no fair reproduction of the universe,
but the expression of man alone. A theory of nature is
nothing but a mass of observations, made with a hunter s
and an artist s eye. A mortal has no time for sympathy
with his victim or his model ; and, beyond a certain
range, he has no capacity for such sympathy. As in
order to live he must devour one-half the world and dis
regard the other, so in order to think and practically
to know he must deal summarily and selfishly with his
materials ; otherwise his intellect would melt again into
endless and irrevocable dreams. Much of what is valued
in science and religion is not lodged in the miscellany
underlying these creations of reason, but is lodged rather
in the rational activity itself, and in the intrinsic beauty
of all symbols bred in a genial mind. Of course, if these
symbols had no real points of reference, if they were
symbols of nothing, they could have no great claim to
consideration and no rational character ; at most they
would be agreeable images. They are, however, at their
best good symbols for diffused facts having a certain
order and tendency ; they render that reality with a
difference, reducing it to a formula or a myth, in which
its tortuous length and trivial detail can be surveyed to
advantage without undue waste or fatigue. Symbols may
thus become eloquent, vivid, important, being endowed
with both poetic grandeur and practical truth.

The facts from which this truth is borrowed, if they
were rehearsed unimaginatively, in their own flat infinity,
would be far from arousing the same emotions. The
human eye sees in perspective ; its glory would vanish
were it reduced to a crawling, exploring antenna. Not
that it loves to falsify anything. That to the worm the
landscape might possess no light and shade, that the
atomic structure of a mountain should be unpicturable,
cannot distress the landscape gardener nor the poet ; what
concerns them is the effect such things may produce in the
human fancy, so that the soul may live in a congenial world.

KNOWLEDGE OF NATURE IS SYMBOLIC 31

Naturalist and prophet are landscape painters on
canvases of their own ; each is interested in his own
perception and perspective, which, if he takes the trouble
to reflect, need not deceive him about what the world
would be if not foreshortened in that particular manner.
This special interpretation is nevertheless precious and.
shows up the world in that light in which it interests
naturalists or prophets to see it. Their figments make
their chosen world, as the painter s apperceptions are the
breath of his nostrils.

While the relevance of the symbol is essential to its
worth since otherwise science would be inapplicable and
religion demoralizing its power and fascination lie in
acquiring a more and more profound affinity to the human
mind, so long as it can do so without surrendering its
relevance to the facts of nature.

The function of history or of criticism is not passively
to reproduce its subject-matter. One real world is enough.
Reflection and description are things superadded, things
which ought to be more winged and more selective than
what they play upon. They are echoes of reality in the
sphere of art, sketches which may achieve all the truth
appropriate to them without belying their creative limita
tions : for their essence is to be intellectual symbols, at
once indicative and original.

The circumstances of life are only the bases or instru
ments of life : the fruition of life is not in retrospect, not
in description of the instruments, but in expression of the
spirit itself, to which those instruments may prove useful ;
as music is not a criticism of violins, but a playing upon
them. This expression need not resemble its ground.
Experience is diversified by colours that are not produced
by colours, sounds that are not conditioned by sounds,
names that are not symbols for other names, fixed ideal
objects that stand for ever-changing material processes.
The mind is fundamentally lyrical, inventive, redundant.
Its visions are its own offspring, hatched in the warmth
of some favourable cosmic gale. The ambient weather
may vary, and these visions be scattered ; but the ideal
world they pictured may some day be revealed again to
some other poet similarly inspired ; the possibility of

32 LITTLE ESSAYS

restoring it, or something like it, is perpetual. Perhaps
human life is not all life, nor the landscape of earth the
only admired landscape in the universe ; perhaps the
ancients who believed in gods and spirits were nearer the
virtual truth (however anthropomorphically they may
have expressed themselves) than any philosophy or religion
that makes human affairs the centre and aim of the world.
Such moral imagination is to be gained by sinking into
oneself, rather than by observing remote happenings,
because it is at its heart, not at its finger-tips, that the
human soul touches matter, and is akin to whatever other
centres of life may people the infinite.

17
RELATIVITY OF SCIENCE

SCIENCE is nothing but developed perception, interpreted
intent, common-sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
It is therefore as much an instinctive product, as much
a stepping forth of human courage in the dark, as is any
inevitable dream or impulsive action. Like life itself,
like any form of determinate existence, it is altogether
autonomous and unjustifiable from the outside. It must
lean on its own vitality ; to sanction reason there is only
reason, and to corroborate sense there is nothing but
sense. Inferential thought is a venture not to be approved
of, save by a thought no less venturesome and inferential.
This is once for all the fate of a living being it is the very
essence of spirit to be ever on the wing, borne by inner
forces toward goals of its own imagining, confined to a
passing apprehension of a represented world. Mind,
which calls itself the organ of truth, is a permanent possi
bility of error. The encouragement and corroboration
which science is alleged to receive from moment to moment
may, for aught it knows, be simply a more ingenious self-
deception, a form of that cumulative illusion by which
madness can confirm itself, creating a whole world, with
an endless series of martyrs, to bear witness to its sanity.

To insist on this situation may seem idle, since no
positive doctrine can gain thereby in plausibility, and no

RELATIVITY OF SCIENCE 33

particular line of action in reasonableness. Yet this
transcendental exercise, this reversion to the immediate,
may be recommended by way of a cathartic, to free the
mind from ancient obstructions and make it hungrier and
more agile in its rational faith. Scepticism is harmless
when it is honest and universal ; it clears the air and is
a means of reorganizing belief on its natural foundations.
Belief is an inevitable accompaniment of practice and
intent, both of which it will cling to all the more closely
after a thorough criticism. When all beliefs are challenged
together, the just and necessary ones have a chance to step
forward and to re-establish themselves alone. The doubt
cast on science, when it is an ingenuous and impartial
doubt, will accordingly serve to show what sort of thing
science is, and to establish it on a sure foundation. Science
will then be seen to be tentative, genial, practical, and
humane, full of ideality and pathos, like every great human
undertaking.

Reason is not indispensable to life, nor needful if living
anyhow be the sole and indeterminate aim ; as the exist
ence of animals and of most men sufficiently proves. In
so far as man is not a rational being and does not live
in and by the mind, in so far as his chance volitions and
dreamful ideas roll by without mutual representation or
adjustment, in so far as his instinct takes the lead and even
his galvanized action is a form of passivity, he may eschew
science and say that life is not intellectual. Yet reason
has the indomitable persistence of all natural tendencies ;
it returns to the attack as waves beat on the shore. To
observe its defeat is already to give it a new embodiment.

18
MATHEMATICS AND MORALS

MATHEMATICS, if it were nothing more than a pleasure,
might conceivably become a vice. Those addicted to it
might be indulging an atavistic taste at the expense of
their humanity. It would then be in the position now
occupied by mythology and mysticism. Even as it is,
mathematicians share with musicians a certain partiality

D

34 LITTLE ESSAYS

in their characters and mental development. Masters
in one abstract subject, they may remain children in the
world ; exquisite manipulators of the ideal, they may be
erratic and clumsy in their earthly ways. Immense as are
the uses and wide the applications of mathematics, its
texture is too thin and inhuman to employ the whole mind
or render it harmonious. It is a science which Socrates
rejected for its supposed want of utility ; but perhaps
he had another ground in reserve to justify his humorous
prejudice. He may have felt that such a science, if
admitted, would endanger his thesis about the identity
of virtue and knowledge.

19
MIND-READING

THE miracle of insight into another mind, as it must seem
to those who have not understood its natural and accidental
origin, extends only to the limits of similar structure and
common occupation, so that the distortion of insight
begins very near home. It begins with constitutional
divergence and deteriorates rapidly into false imputations
and absurd myths. It is hard to understand the minds
of children unless we retain unusual plasticity and capacity
to play ; men and women do not really understand each
other, what rules between them being not so much sym
pathy as habitual trust, idealization, or satire ; foreigners
minds are pure enigmas, and those attributed to animals
are a grotesque compound of ^Esop and physiology. When
we come to religion the ineptitude of all the feelings attri
buted to nature or the gods is so egregious that a sober
critic can look to such fables only for a pathetic expression
of human sentiment and need ; while, even apart from the
gods, each religion itself is quite unintelligible to infidels
who have never followed its worship sympathetically or
learned by contagion the human meaning of its sanctions
and formulas.

Language is an artificial means of establishing unanimity
and transferring thought from one mind to another. Every
symbol or phrase, like every gesture, throws the observer

MIND-READING 35

into an attitude to which a certain idea corresponded in
the speaker ; to fall exactly into the speaker s attitude
is exactly to understand. Every impediment to contagion
and imitation in expression is an impediment to compre
hension. For this reason language, like ail art, becomes
pale with years ; words and figures of speech lose their
contagious and suggestive power. Even the most inspired
verse becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible
hieroglyphic ; the language it was written in dies ; a
learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite
to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is
so irrevocable as mind.

There is evidently one case, however, in which the
pathetic fallacy is not fallacious, the case in which the
object observed happens to be an animal similar to the
observer and similarly affected, as for instance when a
flock or herd are swayed by panic fear. The emotion
which each as he runs attributes to the others is, as usual,
the emotion he feels himself in imitating them ; but this
emotion, fear, is the same which in fact the others are
then feeling. Their aspect thus becomes the recognized
expression for the feeling which really accompanies it.
So in hand-to-hand fighting : the intention and passion
which each imputes to the other is what he himself feels ;
but the imputation is probably just, since pugnacity is
a remarkably contagious and monotonous passion. It is
awakened by the slightest hostile suggestion and is greatly
intensified by example and emulation ; those we fight
against and those we fight with arouse it concurrently,
and the universal battle-cry that fills the air, and that
each man instinctively emits, is an adequate and exact
symbol for what is passing in all their souls.

20

KNOWLEDGE OF CHARACTER

IT is a mark of the connoisseur to be able to read character
and habit and to divine at a glance all a creature s poten
tialities. This sort of penetration characterizes the man

36 LITTLE ESSAYS

with an eye for horse-flesh, the dog-fancier, and men and
women of the world. It guides the born leader in the
judgments he instinctively passes on his subordinates
and enemies ; it distinguishes every good judge of human
affairs or of natural phenomena, who is quick to detect
small but telling indications of events past or brewing.
As the weather-prophet reads the heavens so the man of
experience reads other men. Nothing concerns him less
than their consciousness ; he can allow that to run itself
off when he is sure of their temper and habits. A great
master of affairs is usually unsympathetic. His observa
tion is not in the least dramatic or dreamful ; he does not
yield himself to animal contagion or re-enact other people s
inward experience. He is too busy for that, and too intent
on his own purposes. His observation, on the contrary,
is straight calculation and inference, and it sometimes
reaches truths about people s character and destiny which
they themselves are very far from divining. Such appre
hension is masterful and odious to weaklings, who think
they know themselves because they indulge in copious
soliloquy (which is the discourse of brutes and madmen),
but who really know nothing of their own capacity, situa
tion, or fate.

If Rousseau, for instance, after writing those Con
fessions in which candour and ignorance of self are equally
conspicuous, had heard some intelligent friend like Hume
draw up in a few words an account of their author s true
and contemptible character, he would have been loud
in protestations that no such ignoble characteristics existed
in his eloquent consciousness ; and they might not have
existed there, because his consciousness was a histrionic
thing, and as imperfect an expression of his own nature
as of man s. When the mind is irrational no practical
purpose is served by stopping to understand it, because
such a mind is irrelevant to practice, and the principles
that guide the man s practice can be as well understood
by eliminating his mind altogether. So a wise governor
ignores his subjects religion or concerns himself only
with its economic and temperamental aspects ; if the
real forces that control life are understood, the symbols
that represent those forces in the mind may be disregarded.

KNOWLEDGE OF CHARACTER 37

But such a government, like that of the British in India,
is more practical than sympathetic. While wise men
may endure it for the sake of their material interests,
they will never love it for itself. There is nothing sweeter
than to be sympathized with, while nothing requires a
rarer intellectual heroism than willingness to see one s
equation written out.

Nevertheless this same algebraic sense for character
plays a large part in human friendship. A chief element
in friendship is trust, and trust is not to be acquired by
reproducing consciousness but only by penetrating to
the constitutional instincts which, in determining action
and habit, determine consciousness as well. Fidelity is
not a property of ideas. It is a virtue possessed pre
eminently by nature, from the animals to the seasons
and the stars. But fidelity gives friendship its deepest
sanctity, and the respect we have for a man, for his force,
ability, constancy, and dignity, is no sentiment evoked by
his floating thoughts, but an assurance founded on our
own observation that his conduct and character are to
be counted upon. Smartness and vivacity, much emotion
and many conceits, are obstacles both to fidelity and to
merit. There is a high worth in rightly constituted natures
independent of the play of mind. It consists in that
ingrained virtue which under given circumstances would
insure the noblest action, and with that action of course
the noblest sentiments and ideas ; ideas which would
arise spontaneously and would make more account of
their objects than of themselves.

21

COMRADESHIP

WHEN men are in the same boat together, when a common
anxiety, occupation, or sport unites them, they feel their
human kinship in an intensified form without any greater
personal affinity subsisting between them. The same
effect is produced by a common estrangement from the
rest of society. For this reason comradeship lasts no

38 LITTLE ESSAYS

longer than the circumstances that bring it about. Its
constancy is proportionate to the monotony of people s
lives and minds. There is a lasting bond among school
fellows, because no one can become a boy again and have
a new set of playmates. There is a persistent comrade
ship with one s countrymen, especially abroad, because
seldom is a man pliable and polyglot enough to be at home
among foreigners, or really to understand them. There
is an inevitable comradeship with men of the same breeding
or profession, however bad these may be, because habits
soon monopolize the man. Nevertheless a greater buoyancy,
a longer youth, a richer experience, would break down
all these limits of fellowship. Such clingings to the familiar
are three parts dread of the unfamiliar and want of resource
in its presence, for one part in them of genuine loyalty.
Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them,
but for a man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is
decidedly no place like home.

Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men
and women agree, it is only in their conclusions ; their
reasons are always different. So that while intellectual
harmony between men and women is easily possible, its
delightful and magic quality lies precisely in the fact that
it does not arise from mutual understanding, but is a con
spiracy of alien essences and a kissing, as it were, in the
dark. The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized
like the bees : the masculine soul is a worker, sexually
atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and uni
versal arts ; the feminine is a queen, infinitely fertile, omni
present in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding
in intuitions without method and passions without justice.
Friendship with a woman is therefore apt to be more or
less than friendship : less, because there is no intellectual
parity ; more, because (even when the relation remains
wholly dispassionate, as in respect to old ladies) there is
something mysterious and oracular about a woman s
mind which inspires a certain instinctive deference and
puts it out of the question to judge what she says by
masculine standards. She has a kind of sibylline intuition
and the right to be irrationally a propos. There is a
gallantry of the mind which pervades all conversation

COMRADESHIP 39

with a lady, as there is a natural courtesy towards children
and mystics ; but such a habit of respectful concession,
marking as it does an intellectual alienation as profound,
though not as complete, as that which separates us from
the dumb animals, is radically incompatible with friendship.

22

LOVE

TRUE love, it used to be said, is love at first sight. Manners
have much to do with such incidents, and the race which
happens to set at a given time the fashion in literature
makes its temperament public and exercises a sort of
contagion over all men s fancies. If women are rarely
seen and ordinarily not to be spoken to ; if all imagination
has to build upon is a furtive glance or casual motion,
people fall in love at first sight. For they must fall in
love somehow, and any stimulus is enough if none more
powerful is forthcoming. When society, on the contrary,
allows constant and easy intercourse between the sexes, a
first impression, if not reinforced, will soon be hidden and
obliterated by others. Acquaintance becomes necessary
for love when it is necessary for memory. But what makes
true love is not the information conveyed by acquaintance,
not any circumstantial charms that may be therein dis
covered : it is still a deep and dumb instinctive affinity,
an inexplicable emotion seizing the heart, an influence
organizing the world, like a luminous crystal, about one
magic point. So that although love seldom springs up
suddenly in these days into anything like a full-blown
passion, it is sight, it is presence, that makes in time a
conquest over the heart ; for all virtues, sympathies,
confidences will fail to move a man to tenderness and to
worship unless a poignant effluence from the object envelops
him, so that he begins to walk, as it were, in a dream.

Not to believe in love is a great sign of dulness. There
are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think
all real affection must rest on circumstantial evidence.
But a finely constituted being is sensitive to its deepest

40 LITTLE ESSAYS

affinities. This is precisely what refinement consists in,
that we may feel in things immediate and infinitesimal a
sure premonition of things ultimate and important. Fine
senses vibrate at once to harmonies which it may take
long to verify ; so sight is finer than touch, and thought
than sensation. Well-bred instinct meets reason half-way,
and is prepared for the consonances that may follow.
Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and
unaccountably beautiful. The grounds we may bring
ourselves to assign for our preferences are discovered by
analysing those preferences, and articulate judgments
follow upon emotions which they ought to express, but
which they sometimes sophisticate. So too the reasons
we give for love either express what it feels or else are
insincere, attempting to justify at the bar of reason and
convention something which is far more primitive than
they and underlies them both.

True instinct can dispense with such excuses. It
appeals to the event and is justified by the response which
nature makes to it. It is of course far from infallible ;
it cannot dominate circumstances, and has no discursive
knowledge ; but it is presumably true, and what it fore
knows is always essentially possible. Unrealizable it
may indeed be in the jumbled context of this world, where
the Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a
single line to stand perfect and unmarred.

The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt,
and they remain a background and standard for all happi
ness. If we trace them out we succeed. If we put them
by, although in other respects we may call ourselves happy,
we inwardly know that we have dismissed the ideal, and
all that was essentially possible has not been realized.
Love in that case still owns a hidden and potential object,
and we sanctify, perhaps, whatever kindnesses or partialities
we indulge in by a secret loyalty to something impersonal
and unseen. Such reserve, such religion, would not have
been necessary had things responded to our first expecta
tions. We might then have identified the ideal with the
object that happened to call it forth. The life of reason
might have been led instinctively, and we might have
been guided by nature herself into the ways of peace.

LOVE 41

As it is, circumstances, false steps, or the mere lapse
of time, force us to shuffle our affections and take them
as they come, or as we are suffered to indulge them. A
mother is followed by a boyish friend, a friend by a girl,
a girl by a wife, a wife by a child, a child by an idea. A
divinity passes through these various temples ; they may
all remain standing, and we may continue our cult in them
without outward change, long after the god has fled from
the last into his native heaven. We may try to convince
ourselves that we have lost nothing when we have lost all.
We may take comfort in praising the mixed and perfunctory
attachments which cling to us by force of habit and duty,
repeating the empty names of creatures that have long
ceased to be what we once could love, and assuring our
selves that we have remained constant, without admitting
that the world, which is in irreparable flux, has from the
first been betraying us.

Ashamed of being so deeply deceived, we may try to
smile cynically at the glory that once shone upon us,
and call it a dream. But cynicism is wasted on the ideal.
There is indeed no idol ever identified with the ideal which
honest experience, even without cynicism, will not some
day unmask and discredit. Every real object must cease
to be what it seemed, and none could ever be what the
whole soul desired. Yet what the soul desires is nothing
arbitrary. Life is no objectless dream. Everything that
satisfies at all, even if partially and for an instant, justifies
aspiration and rewards it. Existence, however, cannot be
arrested ; and only the transmissible forms of things can
endure, to match the transmissible faculties which living
beings hand down to one another. The ideal is accordingly
significant, perpetual, and as constant as the nature it
expresses ; but it can never itself exist, nor can its
particular embodiments endure.

Love is accordingly only half an illusion ; the lover,
but not his love, is deceived. His madness, as Plato
taught, is divine ; for though it be folly to identify the
idol with the god, faith in the god is inwardly justified.
That egregious idolatry may therefore be interpreted
ideally and given a symbolic scope worthy of its natural
causes and of the mystery it comes to celebrate. The

42 LITTLE ESSAYS

lover knows much more about absolute good and universal
beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter,
too, be lovers in disguise. Logical universals are terms
in discourse, without vital ideality, while traditional gods
are at best natural existences, more or less indifferent facts.
What the lover comes upon, on the contrary, is truly
persuasive, and witnesses to itself, so that he worships
from the heart and beholds what he worships. That
the true object is no natural being, but an ideal form
essentially eternal and capable of endless embodiments, is
far from abolishing its worth ; on the contrary, this fact
makes love ideally relevant to generation, by which the
human soul and body may be for ever renewed, and at
the same time makes it a thing for large thoughts to be
focussed upon, a thing representing all rational aims.

Whenever this ideality is absent and a lover sees nothing
in his mistress but what every one else may find in her,
loving her honestly in her unvarnished and accidental
person, there is a friendly and humorous affection, admirable
in itself, but no passion or bewitchment of love ; she is a
member of his group, not a spirit in his pantheon. Such
an affection may be altogether what it should be ; it may
bring a happiness all the more stable because the heart
is quite whole, and no divine shaft has pierced it. It is
hard to staunch wounds inflicted by a god. The glance of
an ideal love is terrible and glorious, foreboding death and
immortality together. Love could not be called divine
without platitude if it regarded nothing but its nominal
object ; to be divine it must not envisage an accidental
good but the principle of goodness, that which gives other
goods their ultimate meaning.

Love is a true natural religion ; it has a visible cult,
it is kindled by natural beauties and bows to the best
symbol it may find for its hope ; it sanctifies a natural
mystery ; and, finally, when understood, it recognizes
that what it worshipped under a figure was truly the
principle of all good.

The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.
Love would never take so high a flight unless it sprung
from something profound and elementary. It is accordingly
most truly love when it is irresistible and fatal. The

LOVE 43

substance of all passion, if we could gather it together,
would be the basis of all ideals, to which all goods would
have to refer. Lovers are vividly aware of this fact : their
ideal, apparently so inarticulate, seems to them to include
everything. It shares the mystical quality of all primitive
life. Sophisticated people can hardly understand how
vague experience is at bottom, and how truly that vague
ness supports whatever clearness is afterward attained.
They cling to the notion that nothing can have a spiritual
scope that does not spring from reflection. But in that
case life itself, which brings reflection about, would never
support spiritual interests, and all that is moral would be
unnatural and consequently self-destructive. In truth, all
spiritual interests are supported by animal life ; in this the
generative function is fundamental ; and it is therefore
no paradox, but something altogether fitting, that if that
function realized all it comprises, nothing human would
remain outside. Such an ultimate fulfilment would differ
of course from a first satisfaction, just as all that repro
duction reproduces differs from the reproductive function
itself, and vastly exceeds it. All organs and activities which
are inherited, in a sense grow out of the reproductive
process and serve to clothe it ; so that when the generative
energy is awakened all that can ever be is virtually called
up and, so to speak, made consciously potential ; and
love yearns for the universe of values.

This secret is gradually revealed to those who are
inwardly attentive and allow love to teach them something.
A man who has truly loved, though he may come to recog
nize the thousand incidental illusions into which love
may have led him, will not recant its essential faith. He
will keep his sense for the ideal and his power to worship.
As a harp, made to vibrate to the fingers, gives some
music to every wind, so the nature of man, necessarily
susceptible to woman, becomes simultaneously sensitive
to other influences, and capable of tenderness toward every
object. A philosopher, a soldier, and a courtesan will
express the same religion in different ways. In fortunate
cases love may glide imperceptibly into settled domestic
affections, giving them henceforth a touch of ideality ;
for when love dies in the odour of sanctity people venerate

44 LITTLE ESSAYS

his relics. In other cases allegiance to the ideal may
appear more sullenly, breaking out in whims, or in little
sentimental practices which might seem half-conventional.
Again, it may inspire a religious conversion, charitable
works, or even artistic labours. Nature also is often a
second mistress that consoles us for the loss of a first.

In all these ways people attempt more or less seriously
to lead the life of reason, expressing outwardly allegiance
to whatever in their minds has come to stand for the ideal.
The machinery which serves reproduction thus finds
kindred but higher uses, as every organ does in a liberal
life ; and what Plato called a desire for birth in beauty
may be sublimated even more, until it yearns for an ideal
immortality in a transfigured world, a world made worthy
of that love which its children have so often lavished on it
in their dreams.

PART II
LITTLE ESSAYS ON RELIGION

-15

23

IMAGINATIVE NATURE OF RELIGION

EXPERIENCE has repeatedly confirmed that well-known
maxim of Bacon s, that " a little philosophy inclineth
man s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth
men s minds about to religion." In every age the most
comprehensive thinkers have found in the religion of their
time and country something they could accept, interpreting
and illustrating that religion so as to give it depth and
universal application. Even the heretics and atheists, if
they have had profundity, turn out after a while to be
forerunners of some new orthodoxy. What they rebel
against is a religion alien to their nature ; they are atheists
only by accident, and relatively to a convention which
inwardly offends them, but they yearn mightily in their
own souls after the religious acceptance of a world inter
preted in their own fashion. So it appears in the end that
their atheism and loud protestation were in fact the hastier
part of their thought, since what emboldened them to
deny the poor world s faith was that they were too impatient
to understand it. Indeed, the enlightenment common to
young wits and worm-eaten old satirists, who plume
themselves on detecting the scientific ineptitude of religion
something which the blindest half see is not nearly
enlightened enough : it points to notorious facts incom
patible with religious tenets literally taken, but it leaves
unexplored the habits of thought from which those tenets
sprang, their original meaning, and their true function.
Such studies would bring the sceptic face to face with the
mystery and pathos of mortal existence. They would
make him understand why religion is so profoundly moving
and in a sense so profound!} 7 just. There must needs be

47

48 LITTLE ESSAYS

something humane and necessary in an influence that has
become the most general sanction of virtue, the chief
occasion for art and philosophy, and the source, perhaps, of
the best human happiness. If nothing, as Hooker said,
is "so malapert as a splenetic religion," a sour irreligion
is almost as perverse.

At the same time, when Bacon penned the sage epigram
we have quoted he forgot to add that the God to whom
depth in philosophy brings back men s minds is far from
being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges
them. It would be pitiful indeed if mature reflection bred
no better conceptions than those which have drifted down
the muddy stream of time, where tradition and passion
have jumbled everything together. Traditional concep
tions, when they are felicitous, may be adopted by the
poet, but they must be purified by the moralist and dis
integrated by the philosopher. Each religion, so dear
to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary
a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily
contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts
itself. The sciences are necessarily allies, but religions,
like languages, are necessarily rivals. What religion a
man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as
what language he shall speak. In the rare circumstances
where a choice is possible, he may, with some difficulty,
make an exchange ; but even then he is only adopting
a new convention which may be more agreeable to his
personal temper but which is essentially as arbitrary as
the old.

The attempt to speak without speaking any particular
language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a
religion that shall be no religion in particular. A courier s
or a dragoman s speech may indeed be often unusual and
drawn from disparate sources, not without some mixture
of personal originality ; but that private jargon will have
a meaning only because of its analogy to one or more
conventional languages and its obvious derivation from
them. So travellers from one religion to another, people
who have lost their spiritual nationality, may often retain
a neutral and confused residuum of belief, which they may
egregiously regard as the essence of all religion, so little

IMAGINATIVE NATURE OF RELIGION 49

may they remember the graciousness and naturalness of
that ancestral accent which a perfect religion should have.
Yet a moment s probing of the conceptions surviving in
such minds will show them to be nothing but vestiges
of old beliefs, creases which thought, even if emptied of
all dogmatic tenets, has not been able to smooth away at
its first unfolding. Later generations, if they have any
religion at all, will be found either to revert to ancient
authority, or to attach themselves spontaneously to some
thing wholly novel and immensely positive, to some faith
promulgated by a fresh genius and passionately embraced
by a converted people. Thus every living and healthy
religion has a marked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists
in its special and surprising message and in the bias which
that revelation gives to life. The vistas it opens and the
mysteries it propounds are another world to live in ; and
another world to live in whether we expect ever to pass
wholly into it or no is what we mean by having a religion.
Whoever it was that searched the heavens with his
telescope and could find no God, would not have found
the human mind if he had searched the brain with a
microscope. Yet God existed in man s apprehension long
before mathematics or even, perhaps, before the vault of
heaven ; for the objectification of the whole mind, with its
passions and motives, naturally precedes that abstraction
by which the idea of a material world is drawn from the
chaos of experience, an abstraction which culminates in
such atomic and astronomical theories as science is now
familiar with. The sense for life in things, be they small
or great, is not derived from the abstract idea of their
bodies but is an ancient concomitant to that idea, insepar
able from it until it became abstract. The failure to find
God among the stars, or even the attempt to find him there,
does not indicate that human experience affords no avenue
to the idea of God for history proves the contrary but
indicates rather the atrophy in this particular man of the
imaginative faculty by which his race had attained to
that idea. Such an atrophy might indeed become general,
and God would in that case disappear from human experi
ence as music would disappear if universal deafness
attacked the race. Such an event is made conceivable

50 LITTLE ESSAYS

by the loss of allied imaginative habits, which is observ
able in historic times. Yet possible variations in human
faculty do not involve the illegitimacy of such faculties
as actually subsist ; and the abstract world known to
science, unless it dries up the ancient fountains of poetry
by its habitual presence in thought, does not remove those
parallel dramatizations or abstractions which experience
may have suggested to men. In fact people seldom take
a myth in the same sense in which they would take an
empirical truth. All the doctrines that have flourished
in the world about immortality have hardly affected men s
natural sentiment in the face of death, a sentiment which
those doctrines, if taken seriously, ought wholly to reverse.
Men almost universally have acknowledged a Providence,
but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions
and fears in the presence of events ; and yet, if Provid
ence had ever been really trusted, those preferences would
all have lapsed, being seen to be blind, rebellious, and
blasphemous. Prayer, among sane people, has never
superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end ;
a proof that the sphere of expression was never really
confused with that of reality. Indeed, such a confusion,
if it had passed from theory to practice, would have
changed mythology into madness. With rare exceptions
this declension has not occurred and myths have been
taken with a grain of salt which not only made them
digestible, but heightened their savour.

It is customary to judge religions and philosophies by
their truth, which is seldom their strong point ; yet the
application of that unsympathetic criterion is not unjust,
since they aspire to be true, maintain that they are so, and
forbid any opposed view, no matter how obvious and
inevitable, to be called true in their stead. But belief,
which we have come to associate with religion, belongs
really to science ; myths are not believed in, they are
conceived and understood. To demand belief for an idea
is already to contrast interpretation with knowledge ; it
is to assert that that idea has scientific truth. Allegories,
however, have their virtue ; and when religions and philo
sophies are dead, or when we are so removed from them by
time or training that the question of their truth is not a

IMAGINATIVE NATURE OF RELIGION 51

living question for us, they do not on that account lose all
their interest ; then, in fact, for the first time they manifest
their virtues to the unbeliever. He sees that they are
expressions of human genius ; that however false to their
subject-matter they may be, like the conventions of art
they are true to the eye and to the spirit that fashioned
them. And as nothing in the world, not even the truth,
is so interesting as human genius, these incredible or
obsolete religions and philosophies become delightful to us.
The sting is gone out of their errors, which no longer
threaten to delude us, and they have acquired a beauty
invisible to the eye of their authors, because of the very
refraction which the truth suffered in that vital medium.
We see that they are a kind of poetry in which people half
believed, because it intervened in their lives ; a poetry
that beautified and justified to their minds the unfathomed
facts of their ancestral worship, their social bonds, and
their personal conscience.

24
PROSAIC MISUNDERSTANDINGS

RELIGIOUS doctrines would do well to withdraw their
pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That
pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion
with science and of the vain and bitter controversies of
sects ; it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence
of religion in the soul, when it seeks its sanctions in the
sphere of existence, and forgets that its proper concern
is to express the ideal. For the dignity of religion, like
that of poetry, lies precisely in its ideal adequacy, in its fit
rendering of the meanings and values of life, in its antici
pation of perfection ; so that the excellence of religion is
due to an idealization of experience which, while making
religion noble if treated as poetry, makes it necessarily
false if treated as science. Its function is rather to draw
from reality materials for an image of that ideal to which
reality ought to conform, and to make us citizens, by
anticipation, in the world we crave.

The mass of mankind is divided into two classes the

52 LITTLE ESSAYS

Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals,
and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals, but mad.
The expedient of recognizing facts as facts and accept
ing ideals as ideals, although apparently simple enough,
seems to elude the normal human power of discrimination.

The liberal school that attempts to fortify religion by
minimizing its expression, both theoretic and devotional,
seems to be merely impoverishing religious symbols and
vulgarizing religious aims ; it subtracts from faith that
imagination by which faith becomes an interpretation
and idealization of human life, and retains only a stark
and superfluous principle of superstition. For meagre
and abstract as such a religion may be, it contains all the
venom of absolute pretensions ; it is no less cursed than
the more developed systems with a controversial unrest
and with a consequent undertone of constraint and suspicion.
It tortures itself with the same circular proofs in its
mistaken ambition to enter the plane of vulgar reality and
escape its native element of ideas. It casts a greater
blight than would a civilized orthodoxy on any joyous
freedom of thought. For the respect exacted by an
establishment is limited and external, and not greater than
its traditional forms probably deserve, as normal expres
sions of human feeling and apt symbols of moral truth.
A reasonable deference once shown to authority, the mind
remains, under such an establishment, inwardly and
happily free ; the conscience is not intimidated, the
imagination is not tied up. But the preoccupations of
a hungry and abstract fanaticism poison the liberty
nominally allowed, bias all vision, and turn philosophy
itself, which should be the purest of delights and consola
tions, into an obsession and a burden to the soul. In such
a spectral form religious illusion does not cease to be illusion.
Mythology cannot become science by being reduced in
bulk, but it may cease, as a mythology, to be worth having.

On the other hand, the positivistic school of criticism
would seem to have overlooked the highest function of
human nature. The environing world can justify itself
to the mind only by the free life which it fosters there.
All observation is observation of brute fact, all discipline
is mere repression, until these facts digested and this

PROSAIC MISUNDERSTANDINGS 53

discipline embodied in humane impulses become the
starting-point for a creative movement of the imagination,
the firm basis for ideal constructions in society, religion,
and art. Only as conditions of these human activities
can the facts of nature and history become morally in
telligible or practically important. In themselves they
are trivial incidents, gossip of the Fates, cacklings of their
inexhaustible garrulity. To regard the function of man as
accomplished when these chance happenings have been
recorded by him or contributed to by his impulsive action,
is to ignore his reason, his privilege shared for the rest
with every living creature of using nature as food and
substance for his own life. This human life is not merely
animal and passionate. The best and keenest part of it
consists in that very gift of creation and government which,
together with all the transcendental functions of his own
mind, man has significantly attributed to God as to his
highest ideal. Not to see in this activity the purpose and
standard of all life is to have left human nature half unread.
It is to look to the removal of certain incidental obstacles
in the work of reason as to the solution of its positive
tasks. In comparison with such apathetic naturalism,
all the errors and follies of religion are worthy of indulgent
sympathy, since they represent an effort, however mis
guided, to interpret and to use the materials of experience
for moral ends, and to measure the value of reality by its
relation to the ideal.

25
THE HASTE TO BELIEVE

RELIGIONS and philosophies may be capable of assimilating
a great amount of wisdom even if their first foundation is
folly. When the mind, for want of a better vocabulary,
is reduced to using symbols, it pours into them a part of
its own life and makes them beautiful. Their loss is a real
blow, while the incapacity that called for them endures ;
and the soul seems to be crippled by losing its crutches.
For this reason religions do not disappear when they are
discredited ; it is requisite that they should be replaced.

54 LITTLE ESSAYS

For a thousand years the augurs may have laughed ; they
were bound nevertheless to stand at their posts until the
monks came to relieve them.

The attempt to subsume the natural order under the
moral is like attempts to establish a government of the
parent by a child something children are not averse to.
But such follies are the follies of an intelligent and eager
creature, restless in a world it cannot at once master and
comprehend. They are not due to lack of intelligence or of
faith in law, but rather to a premature vivacity in catching
at laws, a vivacity misled by inadequate information. The
hunger for facile wisdom is the root of these errors. Men
become superstitious, not because they have too much imagi
nation, but because they are not aware that they have any ;
and even the best philosophers seldom perceive the poetic
merit of their systems.

26
PATHETIC NOTIONS OF GOD

IT is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that
religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity, and from
what a hard-pressed and bitter existence they have been
drawn. To be given the best morsel, to be remembered,
to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously
these have been thought points of honour with the gods,
for which they would dispense favours and punishments
on the most exorbitant scale. Nor are the metaphysicians
always happier in their theology. They call God universal
substance and cause ; but the primary substance of things
is their mere material, their first cause is their lowest
instrument. Nothing can be lower or more wholly instru
mental than the substance and cause of all things.

Sometimes, indeed, it is from the good, from the
experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional
harmony between our nature and our environment, that
we draw our conception of the divine life. Yet even then
we succumb to human illusions. We believe those things
to be happy, for instance, which it makes us happy to think
of or to see : the belief in the felicity of the supreme being

PATHETIC NOTIONS OF GOD 55

has no other foundation. Our joy in the thought of omni
potence, omniscience, and changelessness causes us to attri
bute a joy to the possession of them, which they would in
fact, perhaps, be very far from involving or even allowing.

No religion has ever given a picture of deity which men
could have imitated without the grossest immorality.
Yet these shocking representations have not had a bad
effect on believers. The deity was opposed to their own
vices ; those it might itself be credited with offered no
contagious example. In spite of the theologians, we know
by instinct that in speaking of the gods we are dealing in
myths and symbols. Some aspect of nature or some law
of life, expressed in an attribute of deity, is what we really
regard, and to regard such things, however sinister they
may be, cannot but chasten and moralize us. The personal
character that such a function would involve, if it were
exercised willingly by a responsible being, is something
that never enters our thoughts. No such painful image
comes to perplex the plain sense of instinctive, poetic
religion. Homer s stories about the gods can hardly have
demoralized the youths who recited them. To give moral
importance to myths, as Plato tended to do, is to take
them far too seriously and to belittle what they stand for.
Left to themselves they float in an ineffectual stratum of
the brain. They are understood and grow current precisely
by not being pressed, like an idiom or a metaphor.

The gods sometimes appear, and when they do they
bring us a foretaste of that sublime victory of mind over
matter which we may never gain in experience but which
may constantly be gained in thought. When natural
phenomena are conceived as the manifestation of divine
life, human life itself, by sympathy with that ideal
projection of itself, enlarges its customary bounds, until
it seems capable of becoming the life of the universe. A
god is a conceived victory of mind over nature. A visible
god is the consciousness of such a victory momentarily
attained. The vision soon vanishes, the sense of omni
potence is soon dispelled by recurring conflicts with hostile
forces ; but the momentary illusion of that realized good
has left us with the perennial knowledge of good as an
ideal. Therein lies the essence and the function of religion.

56 LITTLE ESSAYS

27
GREEK RELIGION

IN Greek religion, as in all other religions, there was a
background of vulgar superstition. Survivals and revivals
of totem -worship, taboo, magic, ritual barter, and ob
jectified rhetoric are to be found in it to the very end;
yet if we consider in Greek religion its characteristic
tendency, and what rendered it distinctively Greek, we
see that it was its unprecedented ideality, disinterestedness,
and sestheticism. The pagan world, because its maturity
was simpler than our crudeness, seems childish to us.
We do not find there our sins and holiness, our love, charity,
and honour. To the Greek, in so far as he was a Greek,
religion was an aspiration to grow like the gods by invok
ing their companionship, rehearsing their story, feeling
vicariously the glow of their splendid prerogatives, and
placing them, in the form of beautiful and very human
statues, constantly before his eyes. This sympathetic
interest in the immortals took the place, in the typical
Greek mind, of any vivid hope of human immortality ;
perhaps it made such a hope seem superfluous and in
appropriate. Mortality belonged to man, as immortality
to the gods ; and the one was the complement of the other.
Imagine a poet who to the freedom and simplicity of Homer
should have added the more reverent idealism of a later
age ; and what an inexhaustible fund of poetry might
he not have found in this conception of the immortals
leading a human life, without its sordid contrarieties and
limitations, eternally young, and frank, and different 1

28
ORIGINAL CHRISTIAN FAITH

THE pagan poets, when they devised a myth, half believed
in it for a fact. What really lent some truth moral truth
only to their imaginations was the beauty of nature,

ORIGINAL CHRISTIAN FAITH 57

the comedy of life, or the groans of mankind, crushed
between the upper and the nether millstones ; but being
scientifically ignorant they allowed their pictorial wisdom
to pass for a revealed science, for a physics of the unseen.
If even among the pagans the poetic expression of human
experience could be mistaken in this way for knowledge of
occult existences, how much more must this have been
the case among a more ignorant and a more intense nation
like the Jews ? Indeed, events are what the Jews have
always remembered and hoped for ; if their religion was
not a guide to events, an assured means towards a positive
and experimental salvation, it w r as nothing. Their theology
was meagre in the description of the Lord s nature, but
rich in the description of his ways. Indeed, their belief
in the existence and power of the Lord, if we take it
pragmatically and not imaginatively, was simply the belief
in certain moral harmonies in destiny, in the sufficiency
of conduct of a certain sort to secure success and good
fortune, both national and personal. This faith was
partly an experience and partly a demand ; it turned on
history and prophecy. History was interpreted by a
prophetic insight into the moral principle, believed to
govern it ; and prophecy was a passionate demonstration
of the same principles, at work in the catastrophes of the
day or of the morrow.

The after-effects of Hebraism, however, were contrary
to its foundations ; for the Jews loved the world so much
that they brought themselves, in order to win and enjoy
it, to an intense concentration of purpose ; but this effort
and discipline not only failed of their object, but grew far
too absolute and sublime to think their object could ever
have been earthly ; and the supernatural machinery which
was to have secured prosperity, while that still enticed,
now had to furnish some worthier object for the passion
it had artificially fostered. Fanaticism consists in re
doubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

Christianity, being a practical and living faith in a
possible eventual redemption from sin, from the punish
ment for sin, from the thousand circumstances that make
the most brilliant worldly life a sham and a failure, essenti
ally involves a faith in a supernatural physics, in such an

58 LITTLE ESSAYS

economy of forces, behind, within, and around the discover
able forces of nature, that the destiny which nature seems
to prepare for us may be reversed, that failures may be
turned into successes, ignominy into glory, and humble
faith into triumphant vision : and this not merely by
a change in our point of view or estimation of things,
but by an actual historical, physical transformation in
the things themselves. To believe this in our day may
require courage, even a certain childish simplicity ; but were
not courage and a certain childish simplicity always
requisite for Christian faith ? It never was a religion for
the rationalist and the worldling ; it was based on aliena
tion from the world, from the intellectual world no less
than from the economic and political. It flourished in the
Oriental imagination that is able to treat all existence with
disdain and to hold it superbly at arm s length, and at the
same time is subject to visions and false memories, is swayed
by the eloquence of private passion, and raises confidently
to heaven the cry of the poor, the bereaved, and the
distressed. Its daily bread, from the beginning, was
hope for a miraculous change of scene, for prison walls
falling to the ground about it, for a heart inwardly com
forted, and a shower of good things from the sky.

It is clear that a supernaturalistic faith of this sort,
which might wholly inspire some revolutionary sect, can
never wholly inspire human society. Whenever a nation
is converted to Christianity, its Christianity, in practice,
must be largely converted into paganism. The true
Christian is in all countries a pilgrim and a stranger ; not
his kinsmen, but whoever does the will of his Father who
is in heaven, is his brother and sister and mother and his
real compatriot. In a nation that calls itself Christian
every child may be pledged, at baptism, to renounce the
world, the flesh, and the devil ; but the flesh will assert
itself notwithstanding, the devil will have his due, and the
nominal Christian, become a man of business and the head
of a family, will form an integral part of that very world
which he will pledge his children to renounce in turn as he
holds them over the font. The lips, even the intellect, may
continue to profess the Christian ideal ; but public and
social life will be guided by quite another.

ORIGINAL CHRISTIAN FAITH 59

The ages of faith, the ages of Christian unity, were such
only superficially. When all men are Christians only a
small element can be Christian in the average man. The
thirteenth century, for instance, is supposed to be the
golden age of Catholicism ; but what seems to have filled
it, if we may judge by the witness of Dante ? Little but
bitter conflicts, racial and religious ; faithless rebellions,
both in states and in individuals, against the Christian
regimen : worldliness in the church, barbarism in the
people, and a dawning of all sorts of scientific and aesthetic
passions, in themselves quite pagan and contrary to the
spirit of the gospel. Christendom at that time was by no
means a kingdom of God on earth ; it was a conglomeration
of incorrigible rascals, intellectually more or less Christian.
We may see the same thing under different circumstances
in the Spain of Philip II. Here was a government con
sciously labouring, in the service of the church, to resist
Turks, convert pagans, banish Moslems, and crush Protest
ants. Yet the very forces engaged in defending the
church (the army and the Inquisition) were alien to the
Christian life ; they were fit embodiments rather of chiv
alry and greed, or of policy and jealous dominion. The
ecclesiastical forces also theology, ritual, and hierarchy
employed in spreading the gospel, were themselves alien
to the gospel. An anti-worldly religion finds itself in fact
in this dilemma : if it remains merely spiritual, developing
no material organs, it cannot affect the world ; while if it
develops organs with which to operate on the world, these
organs become a part of the world from which it is trying
to wean the individual spirit, so that the moment it is
armed for conflict such a religion has two enemies on its
hands. It is stifled by its necessary armour, and adds
treason in its members to hostility in its foes. The passions
and arts it uses against its opponents are as fatal to itself
as those which its opponents array against it.

In every age in which a supernaturalistic system is
preached we must accordingly expect to find the world
standing up stubbornly against it, essentially unconverted
and hostile, whatever name it may have been christened
with ; and we may expect the spirit of the world to find
expression, not only in overt opposition to the super-

60 LITTLE ESSAYS

naturalistic system, but also in the surviving or supervening
worldliness of the faithful. Such an insidious revulsion
of the natural man against a religion he does not openly
discard is what, in modern Christendom, we call the
Renaissance. No less than the Revolution (which is the
later open rebellion against the same traditions) the
Renaissance is radically inimical to Christianity. To say
that Christianity survives, even if weakened or disestab
lished, is to say that the Renaissance and the Revolution
are still incomplete. Far from being past events they are
living programmes. The ideal of the Renaissance is to
restore pagan standards in polite learning, in philosophy,
in sentiment, and in morals. It is to abandon and exactly
reverse one s baptismal vows. Instead of forsaking this
wicked world, the men of the Renaissance accept, love, and
cultivate the world, with all its pomp and vanities ; they
believe in the blamelessness of natural life and in its
perfectibility ; or they cling at least to a noble ambition
to perfect it and a glorious ability to enjoy it. Instead of
renouncing the flesh, they feed, refine, and adorn it ; their
arts glorify its beauty and its passions. And far from
renouncing the devil if we understand by the devil the
proud assertion on the part of the finite of its autonomy :
autonomy of the intellect in science, autonomy of the
heart and will in morals the men of the Renaissance are
possessed by the devil altogether. They worship nothing
and acknowledge authority in nothing save in their own
spirit. No opposition could be more radical and complete
than that between the Renaissance and the anti-worldly
religion of the gospel.

29
THE CONVERT

WHAT overcame the world, because it was what the
world desired, was not a moral reform for that was
preached by every sect ; not an ascetic regimen for that
was practised by heathen gymnosophists and pagan
philosophers ; not brotherly love within the church for

THE CONVERT 61

the Jews had and have that at least in equal measure ;
but what overcame the world was what Saint Paul said he
would always preach : Christ and him crucified. Therein
was a new poetry, a new ideal, a new God. Therein was
the transcript of the real experience of humanity, as men
found it in their inmost souls and as they were dimly
aware of it in universal history. The moving power was
a fable for who stopped to question whether its elements
were historical, if only its meaning were profound and its
inspiration contagious ? This fable had points of attach
ment to real life in a visible brotherhood and in an extant
worship, as well as in the religious past of a whole people.
At the same time it carried the imagination into a new
sphere ; it sanctified the poverty and sorrow at which
paganism had shuddered ; it awakened tenderer emotions,
revealed more humane objects of adoration, and furnished
subtler instruments of grace. It was a whole world of
poetry descended among men, like the angels at the
Nativity, doubling, as it were, their habitation, so that
they might move through supernatural realms in the spirit
while they walked the earth in the flesh. The consciousness
of new loves, new duties, fresh consolations, and luminous,
unutterable hopes accompanied them wherever they went.
They stopped willingly in the midst of their business for
recollection, like men in love ; they sought to stimulate
their imaginations, to focus, as it were, the long vistas of
an invisible landscape.

A crude and superficial theology may confuse God
with the thunder, the mountains, the heavenly bodies, or
the whole universe ; but when we pass from these easy
identifications to a religion that has taken root in the
hearts of men, we find its objects and its dogmas purely
ideal, transparent expressions of moral experience and
perfect counterparts of human needs. The evidence of
history or of the senses is left far behind and never thought
of ; the evidence of the heart, the value of the idea, are
alone regarded.

Religion, then, offers another world, almost as vast and
solid as the real one, in which the soul may develop. In
entering it we do not enter a sphere of arbitrary dreams,
but a sphere of law where learning, experience, and happi-

62 LITTLE ESSAYS

ness may be gained. There is more method, more reason,
in such madness than in the sanity of most people. Hence
the believer in any adequate and mature religion clings to
it with such strange tenacity and regards it as his highest
heritage, while the outsider, whose imagination speaks
another language, or is dumb altogether, wonders how so
wild a fiction can take root in a reasonable mind.

30
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE A MORAL ALLEGORY

THE great characteristic of Christianity, inherited from
Judaism, was that its scheme was historical. Not exist
ences but events were the subject of its primary interest.
It presented a story, not a cosmology. It was an epic
in which there was, of course, superhuman machinery
but of which the subject was man, and, notable circum
stance, the Hero was a man as well. Like Buddhism, it
gave the highest honour to a man who could lead his
fellow-men to perfection. What had previously been the
divine reality the engine of nature now became a
temporary stage, built for the exigencies of a human drama.
What had been before a detail of the edifice the life of
man now became the argument and purpose of the
whole creation. Notable transformation, on which the
philosopher cannot meditate too much.

Was Christianity right in saying that the world was
made for man ? Was the account it adopted of the
method and causes of creation conceivably correct ?
Was the garden of Eden a historical reality, and were the
Hebrew prophecies announcements of the advent of Jesus
Christ ? Did the deluge come because of man s wickedness,
and will the last day coincide with the dramatic denoument
of church history ? In other words, is the spiritual
experience of man the explanation of the universe ?
Certainly not, if we are thinking of a scientific, not of a
poetical explanation. As a matter of fact, man is a product
of laws which must also destroy him, and which, as Spinoza
would say, infinitely exceed him in their scope and power.

CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE A MORAL ALLEGORY 63

His welfare is indifferent to the stars, but dependent on
them. And yet that counter-Copernican revolution accom
plished by Christianity a revolution which Kant should
hardly have attributed to himself which put man in
the centre of the universe and made the stars circle
about him, must have some kind of justification. And
indeed its justification (if we may be so brief on so great a
subject) is that what is false in the science of facts may
be true in the science of values. While the existence of
things must be understood by referring them to their
causes, which are mechanical, their functions can only be
explained by what is interesting in their results ; in other
words, by their relation to human nature and to human
happiness.

The Christian drama was a magnificent poetic rendering
of this side of the matter, a side which Socrates had en
visaged by his admirable method, but which now flooded
the consciousness of mankind with torrential emotions.
Christianity was born under an eclipse, when the light of
nature was obscured ; but the orb that intercepted that
light was itself luminous, and shed on succeeding ages a
moonlike radiance, paler and sadder than the other, but
no less divine, and meriting no less to be eternal. Man
now studied his own destiny, as he had before studied the
sky, and the woods, and the sunny depths of water ; and
as the earlier study produced in his soul anima naturaliter
poeta the images of Zeus, Pan, and Nereus, so the later
study produced the images of Jesus and of Mary, of heaven
and hell, of miracles and sacraments. The observation
was no less exact, the translation into poetic images no less
wonderful here than there. To trace the endless trans
figuration, with all its unconscious ingenuity and harmony,
might be the theme of a fascinating science. Let not the
reader fancy that in Christianity everything was settled
by records and traditions. The idea of Christ himself
had to be constructed by the imagination in response to
moral demands, tradition giving only the barest external
points of attachment. The facts were nothing until they
became symbols ; and nothing could turn them into
symbols except an eager imagination on the watch for all
that might embody its dreams.

64 LITTLE ESSAYS

The crucifixion, for example, would remain a tragic
incident without further significance if we regaid it merely
as a historical fact ; to make it a religious mystery, an
idea capable of converting the world, the moral imagination
must transform it into something that happens for the sake
of the soul, so that each believer may say to himself that
Christ so suffered for the love of him. And such a thought
is surely the obj edification of an inner impulse ; the idea
of Christ becomes something spiritual, something poetical.
What literal meaning could there be in saying that one man
or one God died for the sake of each and every other
individual ? By what effective causal principle could
their salvation be thought to necessitate his death, or his
death to make possible their salvation ? By an vorrepov
7rp6rpov natural to the imagination ; for in truth the matter
is reversed. Christ s death is a symbol of human life.
Men could " believe in " his death, because it was a figure
and premonition of the burden of their experience. That
is why, when some Apostle told them the story, they could
say to him : " Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet :
thou hast told me all things whatsoever I have felt."
Thus the central fact of ah 1 Christ s history, narrated by
every Evangelist, could still be nothing but a painful
incident, as unessential to the Christian religion as the death
of Socrates to the Socratic philosophy, were it not trans
formed by the imagination of the believer into the counter
part of his own moral need. Then, by ceasing to be
viewed merely as a historical fact, the death of Christ
becomes a religious inspiration. The whole of Christian
doctrine is thus religious and efficacious only when it
becomes poetry.

Take, as another example, the doctrine of eternal
rewards and punishments. Many perplexed Christians
of our day try to reconcile this spirited fable with their
modern horror of physical suffering and their detestation of
cruelty ; and it must be admitted that the image of men
suffering unending tortures in retribution for a few ignorant
and sufficiently wretched sins is, even as poetry, somewhat
repellent. The idea of torments and vengeance is happily
becoming alien to our society, and is therefore not a natural
vehicle for our religion. Some accordingly reject altogether

CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE A MORAL ALLEGORY 65

the Christian doctrine on this point, which is too strong
for their nerves. Their objection, of course, is not simply
that there is no evidence of its truth. If they asked for
evidence, would they believe anything ? Proofs are the
last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels
the imaginative fitness of its faith and knows instinctively
that, in such a matter, imaginative fitness is all that can be
required. The reason men reject the doctrine of eternal
punishment is that they find it distasteful or unmeaning.
They show, by the nature of their objections, that they
acknowledge poetic propriety or moral truth to be the sole
criterion of credibility in religion.

But, passing over the change of sentiment which gives
rise to this change of doctrine, let us inquire of what reality
Christian eschatology was the imaginative rendering.
What was it in the actual life of men that made them think
of themselves as hanging between eternal bliss and eternal
perdition ? Was it not the diversity, the momentousness,
and the finality of their experience here ? No doubt the
desire to make the reversal of the injustices of this world
as melodramatic and picturesque as possible contributed
to the adoption of this idea ; the ideal values of life were
thus contrasted with its apparent values in the most absolute
and graphic manner. But we may say that beneath this
motive, based on the exigences of exposition and edification,
there was a deeper intuition. There was the genuine
moralist s sympathy with a philosophic and logical view of
immortality rather than with a superstitious and senti
mental one. Another life exists and is infinitely more
important than this life ; but it is reached by the intuition
of ideals, not by the multiplication of phenomena ; it is
an eternal state not an indefinite succession of changes.
Transitory life ends for the Christian when the balance-
sheet of his individual merits and demerits is made up, and
the eternity that ensues is the eternal reality of those
values.

For the Oriental, who believed in transmigration, the
individual dissolved into an infinity of phases ; he went on
actually and perpetually, as nature does ; his immortality
was a long purgatory behind which a shadowy hell and
heaven scarcely appeared in the form of annihilation or

F

66 LITTLE ESSAYS

absorption. This happened because the oriental mmd
has no middle ; it oscillates between extremes and passes
directly from sense to mysticism, and back again ; it lacks
virile understanding and intelligence creative of form.
But Christianity, following in this the Socratic philosophy,
rose to the conception of eternal essences, forms suspended
above the flux of natural things and expressing the ideal
suggestions and rational goals of experience. Each man,
for Christianity, has an immortal soul ; each life has the
potentiality of an eternal meaning, and as this potentiality
is or is not actualized, as this meaning is or is not expressed
in the phenomena of this life, the soul is eternally saved or
lost. As the tree falleth, so it lieth. The finality of this
brief and personal experiment, the consequent awful
solemnity of the hour of death when all trial is over and
when the eternal sentence is passed, has always been duly
felt by the Christian. The church, indeed, in answer to
the demand for a more refined and discriminating presenta
tion of its dogma, introduced the temporary discipline of
purgatory, in which the virtues already stamped on the
soul might be brought to greater clearness and rid of the
alloy of imperfection ; but this purification allowed no
essential development, no change of character or fate ; the
soul in purgatory was already saved, already holy.

The harshness of the doctrine of eternal judgment is
therefore a consequence of its symbolic truth. The church
might have been less absolute in the matter had she yielded
more, as she did in the doctrine of purgatory, to the desire
for merely imaginary extensions of human experience.
But her better instincts kept her, after all, to the moral
interpretation of reality ; and the facts to be rendered were
uncompromising enough. Art is long, life brief. To have /
told men they would have infinite opportunities to reform
and to advance would have been to feed them on gratuitous
fictions without raising them, as it was the function of
Christianity to do, to a consciousness of the spiritual
meaning and upshot of existence. To have speculated
about the infinite extent of experience and its endless
transformations, after the manner of the barbarous religions,
and never to have conceived its moral essence, would have
been to encourage a dream which may by chance be

CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE A MORAL ALLEGORY 67

prophetic, but which is as devoid of ideal meaning as of
empirical probability. Christian fictions were at least
significant ; they beguiled the intellect, no doubt, and
were mistaken for accounts of external fact ; but they
enlightened the imagination ; they made man understand,
as never before or since, the pathos and nobility of his life,
the necessity of discipline, the possibility of sanctity.
The divine was reached by the idealization of the human.
The supernatural was an allegory of the natural, and
rendered the values of transitory things under the image of
eternal existences.

THE CHRISTIAN EPIC

WHEN the Jewish notion of creation and divine government
of the world presented itself to the Greeks, they hastened
to assimilate it to their familiar notions of imitation, ex
pression, finality, and significance. And when the Chris
tians spoke of Christ as the Son of God, who now sat at
his right hand in the heavens, their Platonic disciples
immediately thought of the Nous or Logos, the divine
Intelligence, incarnate as they had always believed in the
whole world, and yet truly the substance and essence of
divinity. To say that this incarnation had taken place
pre-eminently, or even exclusively, in Christ was not an
impossible concession to make to pious enthusiasm, at
least if the philosophy involved in the old conception could
be retained and embodied in the new orthodoxy. Sacred
history could thus be interpreted as a temporal execution
of eternal decrees, and the plan of salvation as an ideal
necessity. Cosmic scope and metaphysical meaning were
given to Hebrew tenets, so unspeculative in their original
intention, and it became possible even for a Platonic
philosopher to declare himself a Christian.

The eclectic Christian philosophy thus engendered
constitutes one of the most complete, elaborate, and
impressive products of the human mind. The ruins of
more than one civilization and of more than one philosophy
were ransacked to furnish materials for this heavenly

68 LITTLE ESSAYS

Byzantium. It was a myth circumstantial and sober
enough in tone to pass for an account of facts, and yet
loaded with enough miracle, poetry, and submerged
wisdom to take the place of a moral philosophy and present
what seemed at the time an adequate ideal to the heart.
Many a mortal, in all subsequent ages, perplexed and
abandoned in this ungovernable world, has set sail resolutely
for that enchanted island and found there a semblance of
happiness, its narrow limits give so much room for the
soul and its penitential soil breeds so many consolations.
True, the brief time and narrow argument into which
Christian imagination squeezes the world must seem to a
speculative pantheist childish and poor, involving, as it
does, a fatuous perversion of nature and history and a
ridiculous emphasis laid on local events and partial interests.
Yet just this violent reduction of things to a human stature,
this half-innocent, half-arrogant assumption that what is
important for a man must control the whole universe, is
what made Christian philosophy originally appealing and
what still arouses, in certain quarters, enthusiastic belief
in its beneficence and finality.

Nor should we wonder at this enduring illusion. Man
is still in his childhood ; for he cannot respect an ideal
which is not imposed on him against his will, nor can he
find satisfaction in a good created by his own action. He
is afraid of a universe that leaves him alone. Freedom
appals him ; he can apprehend in it nothing but tedium
and desolation, so immature is he and so barren does he
think himself to be. He has to imagine what the angels
would say, so that his own good impulses (which create
those angels) may gain in authority, and none of the dangers
that surround his poor life make the least impression upon
him until he hears that there are hobgoblins hiding in the
wood. His moral life, to take shape at all, must appear
to him in fantastic symbols. The history of these symbols
is therefore the history of his soul.

There was in the beginning, so runs the Christian story
a great celestial King, wise and good, surrounded by a court
of winged musicians and messengers. He had existed
from all eternity, but had always intended, when the right
moment should come, to create temporal beings, imperfect

THE CHRISTIAN EPIC 69

copies of himself in various degrees. These, of which man
was the chief, began their career in the year 4004 B.C., and
they would live on an indefinite time, possibly, that
chronological symmetry might not be violated, until
A.D. 4004. The opening and close of this drama were
marked by two magnificent tableaux. In the first, in
obedience to the word of God, sun, moon, and stars, and
earth with all her plants and animals, assumed their
appropriate places, and nature sprang into being with all
her laws. The first man was made out of clay, by a special
act of God, and the first woman was fashioned from one
of his ribs, extracted while he lay in a deep sleep. They
were placed in an orchard where they often could see God,
its owner, walking in the cool of the evening. He suffered
them to range at will and eat of all the fruits he had planted
save that of one tree only. But they, incited by a devil,
transgressed this single prohibition, and were banished
from that paradise with a curse upon their head, the man
to live by the sweat of his brow and the woman to bear
children in labour. These children possessed from the
moment of conception the inordinate natures which their
parents had acquired. They were born to sin and to find
disorder and death everywhere within and without them.

At the same time God, lest the work of his hands should
wholly perish, promised to redeem in his good season some
of Adam s children and restore them to a natural life.
This redemption was to come ultimately through a de
scendant of Eve, whose foot should bruise the head of the
serpent. But it was to be prefigured by many partial
and special redemptions. Thus, Noah was to be saved
from the deluge, Lot from Sodom, Isaac from the sacrifice,
Moses from Egypt, the captive Jews from Babylon, and
all faithful souls from heathen forgetfulness and idolatry.
For a certain tribe had been set apart from the begin
ning to keep alive the memory of God s judgments and
promises, while the rest of mankind, abandoned to its
natural depravity, sank deeper and deeper into crimes
and vanities. The deluge that came to punish these evils
did not avail to cure them. " The world was renewed 1
and the earth rose again above the bosom of the waters,

1 Bossuet, Discours sur I histoire universelle, Part. II. chap. i.

70 LITTLE ESSAYS

but in this renovation there remained eternally some trace
of divine vengeance. Until the deluge all nature had
been exceedingly hardy and vigorous, but by that vast
flood of water which God had spread out over the earth,
and by its long abiding there, all saps were diluted ; the
air, charged with too dense and heavy a moisture, bred
ranker principles of corruption. The early constitution
of the universe was weakened, and human life, from
stretching as it had formerly done to near a thousand years,
grew gradually briefer. Herbs and roots lost their primitive
potency and stronger food had to be furnished to man by
the flesh of other animals. . . . Death gained upon life
and men felt themselves overtaken by a speedier chastise
ment. As day by day they sank deeper in their wickedness,
it was but right they should daily, as it were, stick faster
in their woe. The very change in nourishment made
manifest their decline and degradation, since as they
became feebler they became also more voracious and blood
thirsty."

Henceforth there were two spirits, two parties, or, as
Saint Augustine called them, two cities in the world.
The City of Satan, whatever its artifices in art, war, or
philosophy, was essentially corrupt and impious. Its
joy was but a comic mask and its beauty the whitening of
a sepulchre. It stood condemned before God and before
man s better conscience by its vanity, cruelty, and secret
misery, by its ignorance of all that it truly behoved a man
to know who was destined to immortality. Lost, as it
seemed, within this Babylon, or visible only in its obscure
and forgotten purlieus, lived on at the same time the City
of God, the society of all the souls God predestined to
salvation ; a city which, however humble and inconspicuous
it might seem on earth, counted its myriad transfigured
citizens in heaven, and had its destinies, like its foundations,
in eternity. To this City of God belonged, in the first
place, the patriarchs and the prophets who, throughout
their plaintive and ardent lives, were faithful to what
echoes still remained of a primeval revelation, and waited
patiently for the greater revelation to come. To the same
city belonged the magi who followed a star till it halted
over the stable in Bethlehem ; Simeon, who divined the

THE CHRISTIAN EPIC 71

present salvation of Israel ; John the Baptist, who bore
witness to the same and made straight its path ; and
Peter, to whom not flesh and blood, but the spirit of the
Father in heaven, revealed the Lord s divinity. For
salvation had indeed come with the fulness of time, not,
as the carnal Jews had imagined it, in the form of an earthly
restoration, but through the incarnation of the Son of God
in the Virgin Mary, his death upon a cross, his descent into
hell, and his resurrection at the third day according to the
Scriptures. To the same city belonged finally all those
who, believing in the reality and efficacy of Christ s mission,
relied on his merits and followed his commandment of
unearthly love.

All history was henceforth essentially nothing but the
conflict between these two cities ; two moralities, one
natural, the other supernatural ; two philosophies, one
rational, the other revealed ; two beauties, one corporeal,
the other spiritual ; two glories, one temporal, the other
eternal ; two institutions, one the world, the other the
church. These, whatever their momentary alliances or
compromises, were radically opposed and fundamentally
alien to one another. Their conflict was to fill the ages
until, when wheat and tares had long flourished together
and exhausted between them the earth for whose substance
they struggled, the harvest should come ; the terrible day
of reckoning when those who had believed the things of
religion to be imaginary would behold with dismay the
Lord visibly coming down through the clouds of heaven,
the angels blowing their alarming trumpets, all generations
of the dead rising from their graves, and judgment without
appeal passed on every man, to the edification of the
universal company and his own unspeakable joy or con
fusion. Whereupon the blessed would enter eternal bliss
with God their master and the wicked everlasting torments
with the devil whom they served.

The drama of history was thus to close upon a second
tableau : long-robed and beatified cohorts passing above,
amid various psalmodies, into an infinite luminous space,
while below the damned, howling, writhing, and half
transformed into loathsome beasts, should be engulfed in
a fiery furnace. The two cities, always opposite in essence,

72 LITTLE ESSAYS

should thus be finally divided in existence, each bearing
its natural fruits and manifesting its true nature.

Let the reader fill out this outline for himself with its
thousand details ; let him remember the endless mysteries,
arguments, martyrdoms, consecrations that carried out
the sense and made vital the beauty of the whole. Let
him pause before the phenomenon ; he can ill afford,
if he wishes to understand history or the human mind,
to let the apparition float by unchallenged without deliver
ing up its secret. What shall we say of this Christian
dream ?

Those who are still troubled by the fact that this dream
is by many taken for a reality, and who are consequently
obliged to defend themselves against it, as against some
dangerous error in science or in philosophy, may be allowed
to marshal arguments in its disproof. Such, however, is
not my intention. Do we marshal arguments against the
miraculous birth of Buddha, or the story of Cronos devour
ing his children ? We seek rather to honour the piety and
to understand the poetry embodied in those fables. If it
be said that those fables are believed by no one, I reply
that those fables are or have been believed just as un
hesitatingly as the Christian theology, and by men no less
reasonable or learned than the unhappy apologists of our
own ancestral creeds. Matters of religion should never
be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a
lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just,
for knowing so human a passion. That he harbours it is no
indication of a want of sanity on his part in other matters.
But while we acquiesce in his experience, and are glad he
has it, we need no arguments to dissuade us from sharing
it. Each man may have his own loves, but the object
in each case is different. And so it is, or should be, in
religion. Before the rise of those strange and fraudulent
Hebraic pretensions there was no question among men
about the national, personal, and poetic character of
religious allegiance. It could never have been a duty to
adopt a religion not one s own any more than a language,
a coinage, or a costume not current in one s own country.
The idea that religion contains a literal, not a symbolic,
representation of truth and life is simply an impossible idea.

THE CHRISTIAN EPIC 73

Whoever entertains it has not come within the region of
profitable philosophizing on that subject. His science is not
wide enough to cover all existence. He has not discovered
that there can be no moral allegiance except to the ideal.
His certitude and his arguments are no more pertinent to
the religious question than would be the insults, blows,
and murders to which, if he could, he would appeal in the
next instance. Philosophy may describe unreason, as it
may describe force ; it cannot hope to refute them.

32
PAGAN CUSTOM INFUSED INTO CHRISTIANITY

THE western intellect, in order to accept the gospel, had
to sublimate it into a neo-Platonic system of metaphysics.
In like manner the western heart had to render Christianity
congenial and adequate by a rich infusion of pagan custom
and sentiment. This adaptation was more gentle and
facile than might be supposed. We are too much inclined
to impute an abstract and ideal Christianity to the polyglot
souls of early Christians, and to ignore that mysterious
and miraculous side of later paganism from which Christian
cultus and ritual are chiefly derived. In the third century
Christianity and devout paganism were, in a religious sense,
closely akin ; each differed much less from the other than
from that religion which at other epochs had borne or
should bear its own name. Had Julian the Apostate
succeeded in his enterprise he would not have rescued
anything which the admirers of classic paganism could at
all rejoice in ; a disciple of lamblichus could not but plunge
headlong into the same sea of superstition and dialectic
which had submerged Christianity. Reason had suffered
a general eclipse, but civilization, although decayed, still
subsisted, and a certain scholastic discipline, a certain
speculative habit, and many an ancient religious usage
remained in the world. The people could change their
gods, but not the spirit in which they worshipped them.
Christianity had insinuated itself almost unobserved into
a society full of rooted traditions. The first disciples had

74 LITTLE ESSAYS

been disinherited Jews, with religious habits which men
of other races and interests could never have adopted
intelligently; the church was accordingly wise enough to
perpetuate in its practice at least an indispensable minimum
of popular paganism.

Any one who enters a Catholic church with an intelligent
interpreter will at once perceive the immense distance
which separates the official and impersonal ritual sung
behind the altar rails from the daily prayers and practices
of Catholic people. The latter refer to the real exigences
of daily life and serve to express or reorganize personal
passions. While mass is being celebrated the old woman
will tell her beads, lost in a vague rumination over her own
troubles ; while the priests chant something unintelligible
about Abraham or Nebuchadnezzar, the housewife will
light her wax candles, duly blessed for the occasion,
before Saint Barbara, to be protected thereby from the
lightning ; and while the preacher is repeating, by rote,
dialectical subtleties about the union of the two natures
in Christ s person, a listener s fancy may float sadly over
the mystery of love and of life, and (being himself without
resources in the premises) he may order a mass to be said
for the repose of some departed soul.

In a Catholic country every spot and every man has
a particular patron. These patrons are sometimes local
worthies, canonized by tradition or by the Roman see, but
no less often they are simply local appellations of Christ
or the Virgin, appellations which are known theoretically
to refer all to the same numen, but which practically possess
diverse religious values ; for the miracles and intercessions
attributed to the Virgin under one title are far from being
miracles and intercessions attributable to her under
another. He who has been all his life devout to Loreto
will not place any special reliance on the Pillar at Saragossa.
A bereaved mother will not fly to the Immaculate Con
ception for comfort, but of course to Our Lady of the
Seven Sorrows. Each religious order and all the laity
more or less affiliated to it will cultivate special saints and
special mysteries. There are also particular places and
days on which graces are granted, as not on others, and
the quantity of such graces is measurable by canonic

PAGAN CUSTOM INFUSED INTO CHRISTIANITY 75

standards. So many days of remitted penance correspond
to a work of a certain merit, for there is a celestial currency
in which mulcts and remissions may be accurately summed
and subtracted by angelic recorders. One man s spiritual
earnings may by gift be attributed and imputed to another,
a belief which may seem arbitrary and superstitious but
which is really a natural corollary to fundamental doctrines
like the atonement, the communion of saints, and inter
cession for the dead and living.

Another phase of the same natural religion is seen in
frequent festivals, in the consecration of buildings, ships,
fields, labours, and seasons ; in intercessions by the greater
dead for the living and by the living for the lesser dead
a perfect survival of heroes and penates on the one hand and
of pagan funeral rites and commemorations on the other.
Add Lent with its carnival, ember-days, all saints and all
souls , Christmas with its magi or its Saint Nicholas, Saint
Agnes s and Saint Valentine s days with their profane
associations, a saint for finding lost objects and another
for prospering amourettes, since all great and tragic loves
have their inevitable patrons in Christ and the Virgin,
in Mary Magdalene, and in the mystics innumerable.
This, with what more could easily be rehearsed, makes a
complete paganism within Christian tradition, a paganism
for which little basis can be found in the gospel, the mass,
the breviary, or the theologians.

Yet these accretions were as well authenticated as the
substructure, for they rested on human nature. To feel,
for instance, the special efficacy of your village Virgin or
of the miraculous Christ whose hermitage is perched on
the overhanging hill, is a genuine experience. The principle
of it is clear and simple. Those shrines, those images, the
festivals associated with them, have entered your mind
together with your earliest feelings. Your first glimpses of
mortal vicissitudes have coincided with the awe and glitter
of sacramental moments in which those numina were
invoked ; and on that deeper level of experience, in those
lower reaches of irrationalism in which such impressions
lie, they constitute a mystic resource subsisting beneath
all conventions and overt knowledge. When the doctors
blunder as they commonly do the saints may find a

76 LITTLE ESSAYS

cure ; after all, the saints success in medicine seems to a
crude empiricism almost as probable as the physicians .
Special and local patrons are the original gods, and whatever
religious value speculative and cosmic deities retain they
retain surreptitiously, by virtue of those very bonds with
human interests and passionate desires which ancestral
demons once borrowed from the hearth they guarded, the
mountain they haunted, or the sacrifice they inhaled
with pleasure, until their hearts softened toward their
worshippers.

33
CHRIST AND THE VIRGIN

As the God of religion differs from that of metaphysics, so
does the Christ of tradition differ from that of our critical
historians. Even if we took the literal narrative of the
Gospels and accepted it as all we could know of Christ,
without allowing ourselves any imaginative interpretation
of the central figure, we should get an ideal of him, I will
not say very different from that familiar to St. Francis
or St. Theresa, but even from that in the English prayer-
book. The Christ men have loved and adored is an ideal
of their own hearts, the construction of an ever-present
personality, living and intimately understood, out of the
fragments of story and doctrine connected with a name.
This subjective image has inspired all the prayers, all the
conversions, all the penances, charities, and sacrifices, as
well as half the art of the Christian world.

The Virgin Mary, whose legend is so meagre, but whose
power over the Catholic imagination is so great, is an
even clearer illustration of this inward building up of an
ideal form. Everything is here spontaneous sympathetic
expansion of two given events : the incarnation and the
crucifixion. The figure of the Virgin, found in these
mighty scenes, is gradually clarified and developed, until
we come to the thought on the one hand of her freedom
from original sin, and on the other to that of her universal
maternity. We thus attain the conception of one of the
noblest of conceivable roles and of one of the most beautiful

CHRIST AND THE VIRGIN 77

of characters. It is a pity that a foolish iconoclasm should
so long have deprived the Protestant mind of the con
templation of this ideal.

Perhaps it is a sign of the average imaginative dulness
or fatigue of certain races and epochs that they so readily
abandon these supreme creations. For, if we are hopeful,
why should we not believe that the best we can fancy is also
the truest ; and if we are distrustful in general of our
prophetic gifts, why should we cling only to the most mean
and formless of our illusions ? From the beginning to the
end of our perceptive and imaginative activity, we are
synthesizing the material of experience into unities the
independent reality of which is beyond proof, nay, beyond
the possibility of a shadow of evidence. And yet the life
of intelligence, like the joy of contemplation, lies entirely
in the formation and inter-relation of these unities. This
activity yields us all the images which we can compose,
and endows them with the finer and more intimate part of
their beauty. The most perfect of these forms, judged by
its affinity to our powers and its stability in the presence of
our experience, is the one with which we should be content ;
no other kind of veracity could add to its value.

The greatest feats of synthesis which the human mind
has yet accomplished will, indeed, be probably surpassed
and all ideals yet formed be superseded, because they were
not based upon enough experience, or did not fit that
experience with adequate precision. It is also possible
that changes in the character of the facts, or in the powers
of intelligence, should necessitate a continual reconstruc
tion of our world. But unless human nature suffers an in
conceivable change, the chief intellectual and aesthetic value
of our ideas will always come from the creative action of the
imagination.

34
ORTHODOXY AND HERESY

To a person sufficiently removed by time or by philosophy
from the controversies of sects, orthodoxy must always
appear right and heresy wrong ; for he sees in orthodoxy

78 LITTLE ESSAYS

the product of the creative mind, of faith and constructive
logic, but in heresy only the rebellion of some partial
interest or partial insight against the corollaries of a
formative principle imperfectly grasped and obeyed with
hesitation. At a distance, the criticism that disintegrates
any great product of art or mind must always appear
short-sighted and unamiable. Socrates, invoking the local
deities of brooks and meadows, or paying the debt of a
cock to Asclepius (in thanksgiving, it is said, for a happy
death), is more reasonable and noble to our mind than
are the hard denials of Xenophanes or Theodorus. Nor
were the heretics of a later age less unintelligent. The
principle by which the Christian system had developed,
although reapplied by the Protestants to their own inner
life, was not understood by them in its historical applica
tions. They had little sympathy with the spiritual needs
and habits of that pagan society in which Christianity had
grown up. That society had found in Christianity a sort
of last love, a rejuvenating supersensible hope, and had
bequeathed to the gospel of redemption, for its better
embodiment and ornament, all its own wealth of art,
philosophy, and devotion. This embodiment of Christianity
represented a civilization through which the Teutonic
races had not passed and which they never could have
produced ; it appealed to a kind of imagination and senti
ment which was foreign to them. This embodiment,
accordingly, was the object of their first and fiercest attack,
really because it was unsympathetic to their own tempera
ment but ostensibly because they could not find its basis
in those Hebraic elements of Christianity which make up
the greater bulk of the Bible. They did not value the
sublime aspiration of Christianity to be not something
Hebraic or Teutonic but something catholic and human ;
and they blamed everything which went beyond the
accidental limits of their own sympathies and the narrow
scope of their own experience.

Yet it was only by virtue of this complement inherited
from paganism, or at least supplied by the instincts and
traditions on which paganism had reposed, that Christianity
could claim to approach a humane universality or to achieve
an imaginative adequacy.

ORTHODOXY AND HERESY 79

Nor was it right or fitting to make a merely theoretical
or ethical synthesis. Doctrine must find its sensible echo
in worship, in art, in the feasts and fasts of the year.
Only when thus permeating life and expressing itself to
every sense and faculty can a religion be said to have
reached completion ; only then has the imagination
exhausted its means of utterance.

The great success which Christianity achieved in this
immense undertaking makes it, after classic antiquity,
the most important phase in the history of mankind. It
is clear, however, that this success was not complete.
That fallacy from which the pagan religion alone has been
free, that TT/JWTOI/ \pevSos of all fanaticism, the natural
but hopeless misunderstanding of imagining that poetry
in order to be religion, in order to be the inspiration of life,
must first deny that it is poetry and deceive us about the
facts with which we have to deal this misunderstanding
has marred the work of the Christian imagination and
condemned it, if we may trust appearances, to be transitory.
For by this misunderstanding Christian doctrine was brought
into conflict with reality, of which it pretends to prejudge
the character, and also into conflict with what might have
been its own elements, with all excluded religious instincts
and imaginative ideals. Human life is always essentially
the same, and therefore a religion which, like Christianity,
seizes the essence of that life, ought to be an eternal religion.
But it may forfeit that privilege by entangling itself with
a particular account of matters of fact, matters irrelevant
to its ideal significance, and further by intrenching itself,
by virtue of that entanglement, in an inadequate regimen
or a too narrow imaginative development, thus putting its
ideal authority in jeopardy by opposing it to other in
tuitions and practices no less religious than its own.

Can Christianity escape these perils ? Can it reform its
claims, or can it overwhelm all opposition and take the
human heart once more by storm ? The future alone can
decide. The greatest calamity, however, would be that
which seems, alas ! not unlikely to befall our immediate
posterity, namely, that while Christianity should be
discredited, no other religion, more disillusioned and not
less inspired, should come to take its place. Until the

8o LITTLE ESSAYS

imagination should have time to recover and to reassert its
legitimate and kindly power, the European races would
then be reduced to confessing that while they had mastered
the mechanical forces of nature, both by science and by
the arts, they had become incapable of mastering or under
standing themselves, and that, bewildered like the beasts
by the revolutions of the heavens and by their own irrational
passions, they could find no way of uttering the ideal mean
ing of their life.

35
PROTESTANTISM

TAKEN externally, Protestantism is, of course, a form of
Christianity ; it retains the Bible and a more or less copious
selection of patristic doctrines. But in its spirit and
inward inspiration it is something quite as independent
of Judea as of Rome. Its character may be indicated by
saying that it builds religion on conscience, on an emotional
freedom deeply respecting itself but scarcely deciphering
its purposes. It is the self-consciousness of a spirit in
process of incubation, jealous of its potentialities, averse
to definitions and externalities of any kind because it can
itself discern nothing fixed or final. It is adventurous and
puzzled by the world, full of rudimentary virtues and
clear fire, energetic, faithful, rebellious to cynical sugges
tions, inexpert in matters of art and mind. It boasts, not
without cause, of its depth and purity ; but this depth and
purity are those of any formless and primordial substance.
It keeps unsullied that antecedent integrity which is at
the bottom of every living thing and at its core ; it is not
acquainted with that ulterior integrity, that sanctity,
which might be attained at the summit of experience
through renunciation and speculative dominion. It accord
ingly mistakes vitality, both in itself and in the universe,
for spiritual life.

This underlying Teutonic mood, which we must call
Protestantism for lack of a better name, is anterior to
Christianity and can survive it. To identify it with the
gospel may have seemed possible so long as, in opposition

PROTESTANTISM 81

to pagan Christianity, the Teutonic spirit could appeal to
the gospel for support. The gospel has indeed nothing
pagan about it, but it has also nothing Teutonic ; and the
momentary alliance of two such disparate forces must
naturally cease with the removal of the common enemy
which alone united them. The gospel is unworldly, dis
enchanted, ascetic ; it treats ecclesiastical establishments
with tolerant contempt, conforming to them with in
difference ; it regards prosperity as a danger, earthly
ties as a burden, Sabbaths as a superstition ; it revels
in miracles ; it is democratic and antinomian ; it loves
contemplation, poverty, and solitude ; it meets sinners
with sympathy and heartfelt forgiveness, but Pharisees
and Puritans with biting scorn. In a word, it is a product
of the East, where all things are old and equal and a
profound indifference to the business of earth breeds a
silent dignity and high sadness in the spirit. Protestantism
is the exact opposite of all this. It is convinced of the
importance of success and prosperity ; it abominates
what is disreputable ; contemplation seems to it idleness,
solitude selfishness, and poverty a sort of dishonour
able punishment. It is constrained and punctilious in
righteousness ; it regards a married and industrious life
as typically godly, and there is a sacredness to it, as of a
vacant Sabbath, in the unoccupied higher spaces which
such an existence leaves for the soul. It is sentimental,
its ritual is meagre and unctuous, it expects no miracles,
it thinks optimism akin to piety, and regards profit
able enterprise and practical ambition as a sort of moral
vocation. Its Evangelicalism lacks the notes, so prominent
in the gospel, of disillusion, humility, and speculative
detachment. Its benevolence is optimistic and aims at
raising men to a conventional well-being ; it thus misses
the inner appeal of Christian charity which, being merely
remedial in physical matters, begins by renunciation and
looks to spiritual freedom and peace.

Protestantism was therefore attached from the first to
the Old Testament, in which Hebrew fervour appears in
its worldly and pre-rational form. It is not democratic
in the same sense as post-rational religions, which see in
the soul an exile from some other sphere wearing for the

G

82 LITTLE ESSAYS

moment, perhaps, a beggar s disguise : it is democratic
only in the sense of having a popular origin and bending
easily to popular forces. Swayed as it is by public opinion,
it is necessarily conventional in its conception of duty and
earnestly materialistic ; for the meaning of the word vanity
never crosses the vulgar heart. In fine, it is the religion
of a race young, wistful, and adventurous, feeling its
latent potentialities, vaguely assured of an earthly vocation,
and possessing, like the barbarian and the healthy child,
pure but unchastened energies.

Protestantism in its vital elements was thus a perfectly
new, a perfectly spontaneous religion. The illusion that
it was a return to primitive Christianity was useful for
controversial purposes and helped to justify the iconoclastic
passions of the time ; but this illusion did not touch the
true essence of Protestantism, nor the secret of its legitimacy
and power as a religion. Indeed we may say that the
typical Protestant was himself his own church and made
the selection and interpretation of tradition according to
the demands of his personal spirit.

Protestantism has the unmistakable character of a
genuine religion, a character which tradition passively
accepted and dogma regarded as so much external truth
may easily forfeit. It is in correspondence with the
actual ideals and instincts of the believer ; it is the self-
assertion of a living soul. Its meagreness and eccentricity
are simply evidences of its personal basis. It is in full
harmony with the practical impulses it comes to sanction,
and accordingly it gains in efficiency all that it loses in
dignity or truth.

It was this youthful religion profound, barbaric,
poetical that the Teutonic races insinuated into Chris
tianity and substituted for that last sigh of two expir
ing worlds. In the end, with the complete crumbling
away of Christian dogma and tradition, Absolute Egotism
appeared openly on the surface in the shape of German
philosophy. This form, which Protestantism assumed at
a moment of high tension and reckless self-sufficiency, it
will doubtless shed in turn and take on new expressions ;
but that declaration of independence on the part of the
Teutonic spirit marks emphatically its exit from Christianity

PROTESTANTISM 83

and the end of that series of transformations in which
it took the Bible and patristic dogma for its materials.
It now bids fair to apply itself instead to social life and
natural science and to attempt to feed its Protean hunger
directly from these more homely sources.

The patristic systems, though weak in their foundations,
were extraordinarily wise and comprehensive in their
working out ; and while they inverted life they preserved
it. Dogma added to the universe fabulous perspectives ; it
interpolated also innumerable incidents and powers which
gave a new dimension to experience. Yet the old world
remained standing in its strange setting, like the Pantheon
in modern Rome ; and, what is more important, the
natural springs of human action were still acknowledged,
and if a supernatural discipline was imposed, and the
pursuit of earthly happiness seemed hopeless, nature was
not destroyed by its novel expression, nor did reason die
in the cloister : it hibernated there, and could come back
to its own in due season, only a little dazed and weakened
by its long confinement. Such, at least, is the situation in
Catholic regions, where the patristic philosophy has not
appreciably varied. Among Protestants Christian dogma
has taken a new and ambiguous direction, which has at
once minimized its disturbing effect in practice and isolated
its primary illusion. The symptoms have been cured and
the disease driven in.

36
PIETY

PIETY, in its nobler and Roman sense, may be said to mean
man s reverent attachment to the sources of his being and
the steadying of his life by that attachment. A soul is
but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.
If we wish to live associated with permanent racial interests
we must plant ourselves on a broad historic and human
foundation, we must absorb and interpret the past which
has made us, so that we may hand down its heritage
reinforced, if possible, and in no way undermined or
denaturalized. This consciousness that the human spirit

84 LITTLE ESSAYS

is derived and responsible, that all its functions are heritages
and trusts, involves a sentiment of gratitude and duty
which we may call piety.

Piety esteems things apart from their intrinsic worth,
on account of their relation to the agent s person and
fortune. Yet such esteem is perfectly rational, partiality
in man s affections and allegiance being justified by the
partial nature and local status of his life. Piety is the
spirit s acknowledgment of its incarnation. This physical
bond should not, indeed, disturb the intellect in its proper
function or warp its judgments ; you should not, under
guise of tenderness, become foolish and attribute to your
father or child greater stature or cleverness or goodness
than he actually possesses. To do so is a natural foible
but no part of piety or true loyalty. It is one thing to
lack a heart and another to possess eyes and a just imagina
tion. Indeed, piety is never so beautiful and touching,
never so thoroughly humane and invincible, as when it is
joined to an impartial intellect, conscious of the relativity
involved in existence and able to elude, through imaginative
sympathy, the limits set to personal life by circumstance
and private duty. As a man dies nobly when, awaiting
his own extinction, he is interested to the last in what
will continue to be the interests and joys of others, so he
is most profoundly pious who loves unreservedly a country,
friends, and associations which he knows very well to be
not the most beautiful on earth, and who, being wholly
content in his personal capacity with his natural conditions,
does not need to begrudge other things whatever speculative
admiration they may truly deserve. The ideal in this
polyglot world, where reason can receive only local and
temporal expression, is to understand all languages and
to speak but one, so as to unite, in a manly fashion, compre
hension with propriety.

Mankind at large is, to some minds, an object of piety.
But this religion of humanity is rather a desideratum than
a fact. Piety towards mankind must be three-fourths pity.
There are indeed specific human virtues, but they are
those necessary to existence, like patience and courage.
Supported on these indispensable habits, mankind always
carries an indefinite load of misery and vice. Life spreads

PIETY 85

rankly in every wrong and impracticable direction as well
as in profitable paths, and the slow and groping struggle
with its own ignorance, inertia, and folly, leaves it covered
in every age of history with filth and blood. It would hardly
be possible to exaggerate man s wretchedness if it were not
so easy to overestimate his sensibility. There is a fond
of unhappiness in every bosom, but the depths are seldom
probed ; and there is no doubt that sometimes frivolity
and sometimes sturdy habit helps to keep attention on
the surface and to cover up the inner void.

To worship mankind as it is would be to deprive it of
what alone makes it akin to the divine its aspiration.
For this human dust li ves ; this misery and crime are
dark in contrast to an imagined excellence ; they are
lighted up by a prospect of good. Man is not adorable,
but he adores, and the object of his adoration may be
discovered within him and elicited from his own soul.
In this sense the religion of humanity is the only religion,
all others being sparks and abstracts of the same. The
indwelling ideal lends all the gods their divinity. No
power, either physical or psychical, has the least moral
prerogative nor any just place in religion at all unless it
supports and advances the ideal native to the worshipper s
soul. Without moral society between the votary and his
god religion is pure idolatry ; and even idolatry would be
impossible but for the suspicion that somehow the brute
force exorcized in prayer might help or mar some human
undertaking.

There is a philosophic piety which has the universe for
its object. This feeling, common to ancient and modern
Stoics, has an obvious justification in man s dependence
upon the natural world and in its service to many sides of
the mind. Such justification of cosmic piety is rather
obscured than supported by the euphemisms and ambi
guities in which these philosophers usually indulge in their
attempt to preserve the customary religious unction. For
the more they personify the universe and give it the name
of God the more they turn it into a devil. The universe,
so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense
engine ; its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty, make
it alike impressive. If we dramatize its life and conceive

86 LITTLE ESSAYS

its spirit, we are filled with wonder, terror, and amusement,
so magnificent is that spirit, so prolific, inexorable, gram
matical, and dull. Like all animals and plants, the
cosmos has its own way of doing things, not wholly rational
nor ideally best, but patient, fatal, and fruitful. Great
is this organism of mud and fire, terrible this vast, painful,
glorious experiment. Why should we not look on the
universe with piety ? Is it not our substance ? Are we
made of other clay ? All our possibilities lie from eternity
hidden in its bosom. It is the dispenser of all our joys.
We may address it without superstitious terrors ; it is not
wicked. It follows its own habits abstractedly ; it can be
trusted to be true to its word. Society is not impossible
between it and us, and since it is the source of all our
energies, the home of all our happiness, shall we not cling
to it and praise it, seeing that it vegetates so grandly and
so sadly, and that it is not for us to blame it for what,
doubtless, it never knew that it did ? Where there is such
infinite and laborious potency there is room for every hope.
If we should abstain from judging a father s errors or a
mother s foibles, why should we pronounce sentence on
the ignorant crimes of the universe, which have passed
into our own blood ? The universe is the true Adam,
the creation the true fall ; and as we have never blamed
our mythical first parent very much, in spite of the dis
proportionate consequences of his sin, because we felt that
he was but human and that we, in his place, might have
sinned too, so we may easily forgive our real ancestor,
whose connatural sin we are from moment to moment
committing, since it is only the necessary rashness of
venturing to be without fore-knowing the price or the fruits
of existence.

37
SPIRITUALITY

IN honouring the sources of life, piety is retrospective. It
collects, as it were, food for morality, and fortifies it
with natural and historic nutriment. But a digestive
and formative principle must exist to assimilate this

SPIRITUALITY 87

nutriment ; a direction and an ideal have to be imposed
on these gathered forces. So that religion has a second
and a higher side, which looks to the end toward which
we move, as piety looks to the conditions of progress
and to the sources from which we draw our energies.
This aspiring side of religion may be called spirituality.
Spirituality is nobler than piety, because what would
fulfil our being and make it worth having is what alone
lends value to that being s source. Nothing spiritual is
instrumental. Spirit is the music and fruition of all
things. The gift of existence would be worthless unless
existence was good and supported at least a possible
happiness. A man is spiritual when he lives in the presence
of the ideal, and whether he eat or drink does so for the
sake of a true and ultimate good. He is spiritual when
he envisages his goal so frankly that his whole material
life becomes a transparent and transitive vehicle, an instru
ment which scarcely arrests attention but allows the spirit
to use it economically and with perfect detachment and
freedom.

There is no need that this ideal should be pompously
or mystically described. A simple life is its own reward,
and continually realizes its function. Though a spiritual
man may perfectly well go through intricate processes of
thought and attend to very complex affairs, his single eye,
fixed on a rational purpose, will simplify morally the natural
chaos it looks upon and will remain free. This spiritual
mastery is, of course, no slashing and forced synthesis of
things into a system of philosophy which, even if it were
thinkable, would leave the conceived logical machine
without ideality and without responsiveness to actual
interests ; it is rather an inward aim and fixit} in affection
that knows what to take and what to leave in a world over
which it diffuses something of its own peace. It threads
its way through the landscape with so little temptation
to distraction that it can salute every irrelevant thing, as
Saint Francis did the sun and moon, with courtesy and a
certain affectionate detachment.

Spirituality likes to say, Behold the lilies of the field !
For its secret has the same simplicity as their vegetative
art ; only spirituality has succeeded in adding consciousness

88 LITTLE ESSAYS

without confusing instinct. This success, unfortunately
so rare in man s life as to seem paradoxical, is its whole
achievement. Spirituality ought to have been a matter
of course, since conscious existence has inherent value and
there is no intrinsic ground why it should smother that
value in alien ambitions and servitudes. But spirituality,
though so natural and obvious a thing, is subject, like the
lilies beauty, to corruption. I know not what army of
microbes evidently invaded from the beginning the soul s
basis and devoured its tissues, so that sophistication and
bad dreams entirely obscured her limpidity.

38
PRAYER

IT is in the very essence of prayer to regard a denial as
possible. There would be no sense in denning and begging
for the better thing if that better thing had at any rate
to be. The possibility of defeat is one of the circumstances
with which meditation must square our hopes ; seeing
that our prayer may not be granted, what in that case
should we pray for next ? Now the order of nature is in
many respects well known, and it is clear that all realizable
wishes must not transgress certain bounds. The practical
ideal, that which under the circumstances it is best to aim
at and pray for, will not rebel against destiny. Conformity
is an element in all religion and submission in all prayer ;
not because what must be is best, but because the best that
may be pursued rationally lies within the possible, and
can be hatched only in the general womb of being. The
prayer, " Thy will be done," if it is to remain a prayer,
must not be degraded from its original meaning, which
was that an unfulfilled ideal should be fulfilled ; it
expressed aspiration after the best, not willingness to be
satisfied with anything. Yet the inevitable must be
accepted, and it is easier to change the human will than
the laws of nature. To wean the mind from extravagant
desires and teach it to find excellence in what life affords,
when life is made as worthy as possible, is a part of wisdom

PRAYER 89

and religion. Prayer, by confronting the ideal with
experience and fate, tends to render that ideal humble,
practical, and efficacious.

A sense for human limitations, however, has its foil in
the notion of deity, which is nothing but the ideal of man
freed from those limitations which a humble and wise man
accepts for himself, but which a spiritual man never ceases
to feel as limitations. Man, for instance, is mortal, and
his whole animal and social economy is built on that fact,
GO that his practical ideal must start on that basis, and
make the best of it ; but immortality is essentially better,
and the eternal is in many ways constantly present to a
noble mind ; the gods therefore are immortal, and to speak
their language in prayer is to learn to see all things, as
they do and as reason must, under the form of eternity.
The gods are furthermore no respecters of persons ; they
are just, for it is man s ideal to be so. Prayer, since it
addresses deity, will in the end blush to be selfish and
partial ; the majesty of the divine mind envisaged and
consulted will tend to pass into the human mind.

This use of prayer has not been conspicuous in Christian
times, because, instead of assimilating the temporal to the
eternal, men have assimilated the eternal to the temporal,
being perturbed fanatics in religion rather than poets and
idealists. Pagan devotion, on the other hand, was full of
this calmer spirit. The gods, being frankly natural, could
be truly ideal ; I mean, they could express what some
actual creature genuinely aspired to become. They
embodied what was fairest in human life and loved men
who resembled them, so that it was delightful and ennobling
to see their images everywhere, and to keep their names
and story perpetually in mind. They did not by their
influence alienate man from his appropriate happiness,
but they perfected it by their presence. Peopling all
places, changing their forms as all living things must
according to place and circumstance, they showed how all
kinds of being, if perfect in their kind, might be perfectly
good. They asked for a reverence consistent with reason,
and exercised prerogatives that left man free. Their
worship was a perpetual lesson in humanity, moderation,
and beauty. Something pre-rational and monstrous often

go LITTLE ESSAYS

peeped out behind their serenity, as it does beneath the
human soul, and there was certainly no lack of wildness
and mystic horror in their apparitions. The ideal must
needs betray those elemental forces on which, after all,
it rests ; but reason exists to exorcize their madness and
win them over to a steady expression of themselves and
of the good.

Prayer, in fine, though it accomplishes nothing material,
constitutes something spiritual. It will not bring rain,
but until rain comes it may cultivate hope and resigna
tion and may prepare the heart for any issue, opening
up a vista in which human prosperity will appear in its
conditioned existence and conditional value. A candle
wasting itself before an image will prevent no misfortune,
but it may bear witness to some silent hope or relieve
some sorrow by expressing it ; it may soften a little the
bitter sense of impotence which would consume a mind
aware of physical dependence but not of spiritual dominion.
Worship, supplication, reliance on the gods, express both
these things in an appropriate parable. Physical impotence
is expressed by man s appeal for help ; moral dominion
by belief in God s omnipotence. This belief may after
wards seem to be contraolicted by events. It would be so
in truth if God s omnipotence stood for a material magical
control of events by the values they were to generate.
But the believer knows in his heart, in spite of the confused
explanations he may give of his feelings, that a material
efficacy is not the test of his faith. His faith will survive
any outward disappointment. In fact, it will grow by
that discipline and not become truly religious until it
ceases to be a foolish expectation of improbable things and
rises on stepping-stones of its material disappointments
into a spiritual peace. What would sacrifice be but a risky
investment if it did not redeem us from the love of those
things which it asks us to surrender ? What would be the
miserable fruit of an appeal to God which, after bringing
us face to face with him, left us still immersed in what
we could have enjoyed without him ? The real use and
excuse for magic is this, that by enticing us, in the service
of natural lusts, into a region above natural instrumental
ities, it accustoms us to that rarer atmosphere, so that we

PRAYER 91

may learn to breathe it for its own sake. By the time we
discover the mechanical futility of religion we may have-
begun to blush at the thought of using religion mechanic
ally ; for what should be the end of life if friendship with
the gods is a means only ? When thaumaturgy is dis
credited, the childish desire to work miracles may itself
have passed away. Before we weary of the attempt
to hide and piece out our mortality, our concomitant
immortality may have dawned upon us. While we are
waiting for the command to take up our bed and walk
we may hear a voice saying : Thy sins are forgiven thee.

39
THE FEAR OF DEATH

DYING is something ghastly, as being born is something
ridiculous ; and, even if no pain were involved in quitting
or entering this world, we might still say what Dante s
Francesca says of it : // modo ancor m offende, " I
shudder at the way of it." If the fear of death were
merely the fear of dying, it would be better dealt with by
medicine than by argument. There is, or there might be,
an art of dying well, of dying painlessly, willingly, and in
season, as in those noble partings which Attic gravestones
depict, especially if we were allowed to choose our own
time.

But the radical fear of death, I venture to think, is
something quite different. It is the love of life. This
love is not something rational, or founded on experience
of life. It is something antecedent and spontaneous.
It teaches every animal to seek its food and its mate, and
to protect its offspring ; as also to resist or fly from all
injury to the body, and most of all from threatened death.
It is the original impulse by which good is discriminated
from evil, and hope from fear.

Nothing could be more futile, therefore, than to marshal
arguments against that fear of death which is merely
another name for the energy of life, or the tendency to
self-preservation. W 7 hat is most dreaded is not the agony

92 LITTLE ESSAYS

of dying, nor yet the strange impossibility that when we
do not exist we should suffer for not existing. What is
dreaded is the defeat of a present will directed upon life
and its various undertakings. Such a present will cannot
be argued away, but it may be weakened by contradictions
arising within it, by the irony of experience, or by ascetic
discipline. To introduce ascetic discipline, to bring out
the irony of experience, to expose the self-contradictions
of the will, would be the true means of mitigating the love
of life ; and if the love of life were extinguished, the fear
of death, like smoke rising from that fire, would have
vanished also.

The force, for instance, of the great passage against the
fear of death, at the end of the third book of Lucretius,
comes chiefly from the picture it draws of the madness of
life. His philosophy deprecates covetousness, ambition,
love, and religion ; it takes a long step towards the surrender
of life, by surrendering all in life that is ardent, on the
ground that it is painful in the end and ignominious.
To escape from it all is a great deliverance. And since
genius must be ardent about something, Lucretius pours
out his enthusiasm on Epicurus, who brought this deliver
ance and was the saviour of mankind. Yet this was only
a beginning of salvation, and the same principles carried
further would have delivered us from the Epicurean life
and what it retained that was Greek and naturalistic :
science, friendship, and the healthy pleasures of the body.
Had it renounced these things also, Epicureanism would
have become altogether ascetic, a thorough system of
mortification, or the pursuit of death. To those who
sincerely pursue death, death is no evil, but the highest
good. No need in that case of elaborate arguments to
prove that death should not be feared, because it is nothing ;
for in spite of being nothing or rather because it is nothing
death can be loved by a fatigued and disillusioned spirit,
just as in spite of being nothing or rather because it is
nothing it must be hated and feared by every vigorous
animal.

PSYCHIC PHENOMENA 93

40
PSYCHIC PHENOMENA

AMONG the blind, the retina having lost its function, the
rest of the skin is said to recover its primordial sensitiveness
to distance and light, so that the sightless have a clearer
premonition of objects about them than seeing people
could have in the dark. So when reason and the ordinary
processes of sense are in abeyance a certain universal
sensibility seems to return to the soul ; influences at other
times not appreciable make then a sensible impression,
and automatic reactions may be run through in response
to a stimulus normally quite insufficient. Now the com
plexity of nature is prodigious ; everything that happens
leaves, like buried cities, almost indelible traces which an
eye, by chance attentive and duly prepared, can manage
to read, recovering for a moment the image of an extinct
life. Symbols, illegible to reason, can thus sometimes read
themselves out in trance and madness. Faint vestiges
may be found in matter of forms which it once wore, or
which, like a perfume, impregnated and got lodgment
within it. Slight echoes may suddenly reconstitute them
selves in the mind s silence ; and a half-stunned conscious
ness may catch brief glimpses of long-lost and irrelevant
things. Real ghosts are such reverberations of the past,
exceeding ordinary imagination and discernment both in
vividness and in fidelity ; they may not be explicable
without appealing to material influences subtler than those
ordinarily recognized, as they are obviously not discoverable
without some derangement and hypertrophy of the senses.
That such subtler influences should exist is entirely
consonant with reason and experience ; but only a hanker
ing tenderness for superstition, a failure to appreciate
the function both of religion and of science, can lead to
reverence for such oracular gibberish as these influences
provoke. The world is weary of experimenting with magic.
In utter seriousness and with immense solemnity whole
races have given themselves up to exploiting these shabby
mysteries ; and while a new survey of the facts, in the

94 LITTLE ESSAYS

light of natural science and psychology, is certainly not
superfluous, it can be expected to lead to nothing but a
more detailed and conscientious description of natural
processes. The thought of employing such investigations
to save at the last moment religious doctrines founded
on moral ideas is a pathetic blunder ; the obscene super
natural has nothing to do with rational religion. If it
were discovered that wretched echoes of a past life could be
actually heard by putting one s ear long enough to a tomb,
and if (per impossibile) those echoes could be legitimately
attributed to another mind, and to the very mind, indeed,
whose former body was interred there, a melancholy
chapter would indeed be added to man s earthly fortunes,
since it would appear that even after death he retained,
under certain conditions, a fatal attachment to his dead
body and to the other material instruments of his earthly
life. Obviously such a discovery would teach us more
about dying than about immortality ; the truths disclosed,
since they would be disclosed by experiment and observa
tion, would be psycho-physical truths, implying nothing
about what a truly disembodied life might be, if one were
attainable ; for a disembodied life could by no possibility
betray itself in spectres, rumblings, and spasms. Actual
thunders from Sinai and an actual discovery of two stone
tables would have been utterly irrelevant to the moral
authority of the ten commandments or to the existence
of a truly supreme being. No less irrelevant to a supra-
mundane immortality is the length of time during which
human spirits may be condemned to operate on earth
after their bodies are quiet. In other words, spectral
survivals would at most enlarge our conception of the
soul s physical basis, spreading out the area of its mani
festations ; they could not possibly, seeing the survivals
are physical, reveal the disembodied existence of the soul.

A FUTURE LIFE

MANY a man dies too soon and some are born in the wrong
age or station. Could these persons drink at the fountain

A FUTURE LIFE 95

of youth at least once more they might do themselves
fuller justice and cut a better figure at last in the universe.
Most people think they have stuff in them for greater
things than time suffers them to perform. To imagine a
second career is a pleasing antidote for ill-fortune ; the
poor soul wants another chance. But how should a future
life be constituted if it is to satisfy this demand, and how
long need it last ? It would evidently have to go on in an
environment closely analogous to earth ; I could not, for
instance, write in another world the epics which the
necessity of earning my living may have stifled here, did
that other world contain no time, no heroic struggles, or no
metrical language. Nor is it clear that my epics, to be
perfect, would need to be quite endless. If what is foiled
in me is really poetic genius and not simply a tendency
toward perpetual motion, it would not help me if in heaven,
in lieu of my dream t-of epics, I were allowed to beget
several robust children. In a word, if hereafter I am to
be the same man improved I must find myself in the same
world corrected. Were I transformed into a cherub or
transported into a timeless ecstasy, it is hard to see in what
sense I should continue to exist. Those results might be
interesting in themselves and might enrich the universe ;
they would not prolong my life nor retrieve my disasters.
The universe doubtless contains all sorts of experiences,
better and worse than the human ; but it is idle to attribute
to a particular man a life divorced from his circumstances
and from his body.

For this reason a future life is after all best represented
by those frankly material ideals which most Christians
being Platonists are wont to despise. It would be
genuine happiness for a Jew to rise again in the flesh and
live for ever in Ezekiel s New Jerusalem, with its ceremonial
glories and civic order. It would be truly agreeable for any
man to sit in well-watered gardens with Mohammed, clad
in green silks, drinking delicious sherbets, and transfixed by
the gazelle-like glance of some young girl, all innocence
and fire. Amid such scenes a man might remain himself
and might fulfil hopes that he had actually cherished on
earth. He might also find his friends again, which in
somewhat generous minds is perhaps the thought that

96 LITTLE ESSAYS

chiefly sustains interest in a posthumous existence. But
to recognize his friends a man must find them in their
bodies, with their familiar habits, voices, and interests ;
for it is surely an insult to affection to say that he could
find them in an eternal formula expressing their idiosyn
crasy. When, however, it is clearly seen that another life,
to supplement this one, must closely resemble it, does not
the magic of immortality altogether vanish ? Is such a
reduplication of earthly society at all credible ? And the
prospect of awakening again among houses and trees,
among children and dotards, among wars and rumours of
wars, still fettered to one personality and one accidental
past, still uncertain of the future, is not this prospect
wearisome and deeply repulsive ? Having passed through
these things once and bequeathed them to posterity, is it not
time for each soul to rest ?

Dogmas about such a posthumous experience find some
shadowy support in various illusions and superstitions that
surround death, but they are developed into articulate
prophecies chiefly by certain moral demands. One of
these requires rewards and punishments more emphatic
and sure than those which conduct meets with in this
world. Another requires merely a more favourable and
complete opportunity for the soul s development. Con
siderations like these are pertinent to moral philosophy.
It touches the notion of duty whether an exact hedonistic
retribution is to be demanded for what is termed merit
and guilt : so that without such supernatural remuneration
virtue, perhaps, would be discredited and deprived of a
motive. It likewise touches the ideality and nobleness
of life whether human aims can be realized satisfactorily
only in the agent s singular person, so that the fruits of
effort would be forthwith missed if the labourer himself
should disappear.

To establish justice in the world and furnish an adequate
incentive to virtue was once thought the chief business
of a future life. The Hebraic religions somewhat over
reached themselves on these points : for the grotesque
alternative between hell and heaven in the end only
aggravated the injustice it was meant to remedy. Life
is unjust in that it subordinates individuals to a general

A FUTURE LIFE 97

mechanical law, and the deeper and longer hold fate has
on the soul, the greater that injustice. A perpetual life
would be a perpetual subjection to arbitrary power, while
a last judgment would be but a last fatality. That hell
may have frightened a few villains into omitting a crime
is perhaps credible ; but the embarrassed silence which
the churches, in a more sensitive age, prefer to maintain
on that wholesome doctrine once, as they taught, the
only rational basis for virtue shows how their teaching
has to follow the independent progress of morals. Never
theless, persons are not wanting, apparently free from
ecclesiastical constraint, who still maintain that the value
of life depends on its indefinite prolongation. By an
artifice of reflection they substitute vanity for reason,
and selfish for ingenuous instincts in man. Being apparently
interested in nothing but their own careers, they forget that
a man may remember how little he counts in the world
and suffer that rational knowledge to inspire his purposes.
Intense morality has always envisaged earthly goods and
evils, and even when a future life has been accepted
vaguely, it has never given direction to human will or
aims, which at best it could only proclaim more emphatic
ally. It may indeed be said that no man of any depth
of soul has made his prolonged existence the touchstone
of his enthusiasms. Such an instinct is carnal, and if
immortality is to add a higher inspiration to life it must
not be an immortality of selfishness. What a despicable
creature must a man be, and how sunk below the level
of the most barbaric virtue, if he cannot bear to live and
to die for his children, for his art, or for his country !

42
DISINTERESTED INTEREST IN LIFE

ANCIENT culture was rhetorical. It abounded in ideas that
are verbally plausible and pass muster in a public speech,
but that, if we stop to criticize them, prove at once to be
inexcusably false. One of these rhetorical fallacies is the
maxim that men cannot live for what they will not witness.

H

9 8 LITTLE ESSAYS

What does it matter to you, we may say in debate, what
happened before you were born, or what may go on after
you are buried ? And the orator who puts such a challenge
may carry the audience with him, and raise a laugh at the
expense of human sincerity. Yet the very men who
applaud are proud of their ancestors, care for the future of
their children, and are very much interested in securing,
legally, the execution of their last will and testament.
What may go on after their death concerns them deeply,
not because they expect to watch the event from hell or
heaven, but because they are interested ideally in what
that event shall be, although they are never to witness it.
Lucretius, for instance, in his sympathy with nature, in
his zeal for human enlightenment, in his tears for Iphigenia,
long since dead, is not moved by the hope of observing,
or the memory of having observed, what excites his emotion.
He forgets himself. He sees the whole universe spread
out in its true movement and proportions ; he sees mankind
freed from the incubus of superstition, and from the havoc
of passion. The vision kindles his enthusiasm, exalts
his imagination, and swells his verse into unmistakable
earnestness. Tf we follow Lucretius, therefore, in narrow
ing the sum of our personal fortunes to one brief and partial
glimpse of earth, we must not suppose that we need narrow
at all the sphere of our moral interests. On the contrary,
just in proportion as we despise superstitious terrors and
sentimental hopes, and as our imagination becomes self-
forgetful, we shall strengthen the direct and primitive
concern which we feel in the world and in what may go on
there, before us, after us, or beyond our ken. If, like
Lucretius and every philosophical poet, we range over all
time and all existence, we shall forget our own persons, as
he did, and even wish them to be forgotten if only the
things we care for may subsist or arise. He who truly
loves God, says Spinoza, cannot wish that God should
love him in return. One who lives the life of the universe
cannot be much concerned for his own. After all, the life
of the universe is but the locus and extension of ours.
The atoms that have once served to produce life remain fit
to reproduce it ; and although the body they might animate
later would be a new one, and would have a somewhat

DISINTERESTED INTEREST IN LIFE 99

different career, it would not, according to Lucretius, be of
a totally new species ; perhaps not more unlike ourselves
than we are unlike one another, or than each of us is unlike
himself at the various stages of his life.

The soul of nature, in the elements of it, is then, accord
ing to Lucretius, actually immortal ; only the human
individuality, the chance composition of those elements,
is transitory ; so that, if a man could care for what happens
to other men, for what befell him when young or what
may overtake him when old, he might perfectly well care,
on the same imaginative principle, for what may go on
in the world for ever. The finitude and injustice of his
personal life would be broken down ; the illusion of
selfishness would be dissipated ; and he might say to
himself, I have imagination, and nothing that is real is
alien to me.

Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially
sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends.
In thus losing his life gladly he in a sense finds it anew,
since it has now become a part of his function and ideal
to yield his place to others and to live afterwards only in
them. While the primitive and animal side of him may
continue to cling to existence at all hazards and to find
the thought of extinction intolerable, his reason and finer
imagination will build a new ideal on reality better under
stood, and be content that the future he looks to should
be enjoyed by others. When we consider such a natural
transformation and discipline of the will, when we catch
even a slight glimpse of nature s resources and mysteries,
how thin and verbal those belated hopes must seem which
would elude death and abolish sacrifice ! Such puerile
dreams not only miss the whole pathos of human life, but
ignore those specifically mortal virtues which might console
us for not being so radiantly divine as we may at first
have thought ourselves. Nature, in denying us perennial
youth, has at least invited us to become unselfish and
noble.

ioo LITTLE ESSAYS

43
PLATONIC LOVE

PLATONIC love is the application to passion of that pursuit
of something permanent in a world of change, of something
absolute in a world of relativity, which was the essence
of the Platonic philosophy. If we may give rein to the
imagination in a matter which without imagination could
not be understood at all, we may fancy Plato trying to
comprehend the power which beauty exerted over his
senses by applying to the objects of love that profound
metaphysical distinction which he had learned to make
in his dialectical studies the distinction between the
appearance to sense and the reality envisaged by the
intellect, between the phenomenon and the ideal. The
whole natural world had come to seem to him like a world
of dreams. In dreams images succeed one another without
other meaning than that which they derive from our
strange power of recognition a power which enables us
somehow, among the most incongruous transformations
and surroundings, to find again the objects of our waking
life, and to name those absurd and unmannerly visions by
the name of father or mother or by any other familiar
name. As these resemblances to real things make up all
the truth of our dream, and these recognitions all its
meaning, so Plato thought that all the truth and meaning
of earthly things was the reference they contained to a
heavenly original. This heavenly original we remember
and recognize even among the distortions, disappearances,
and multiplications of its earthly copies.

This thought is easily applicable to the affections ;
indeed, it is not impossible that it was the natural transcend
ence of any deep glance into beauty, and the lessons in
disillusion and idealism given by that natural metaphysician
we call love, that first gave Plato the key to his general
system. There is, at any rate, no sphere in which the
supersensible is approached with so warm a feeling of
its reality, in which the phenomenon is so transparent
and so indifferent a symbol of something perfect and

PLATONIC LOVE 101

divine beyond. In love and beauty, if anywhere, even the
common man thinks he has visitations from a better world,
approaches to a lost happiness ; a happiness never tasted
by us in this world, and yet so natural, so expected, that
we look for it at every turn of a corner, in every new face ;
we look for it with so much confidence, with so much depth
of expectation, that we never quite overcome our disappoint
ment that it is not found.

And it is not found, no, never, in spite of what we
may think when we are first in love. Plato knew this well
from his experience. He had had successful loves, or
what the world calls such, but he could not fancy that
these successes were more than provocations, more than
hints of what the true good is. To have mistaken them
for real happiness would have been to continue to dream.
It would have shown as little comprehension of the heart s
experience as the idiot shows of the experience of the senses
when he is unable to put together impressions of his eyes
and hands and to say, " Here is a table ; here is a stool."
It is by a parallel use of the understanding that we put
together the impressions of the heart and the imagination
and are able to say, " Here is absolute beauty : here is
God." The impressions themselves have no permanence,
no intelligible essence. As Plato said, they are never
anything fixed but are always either becoming or ceasing
to be what we think them. There must be, he tells us,
an eternal and clearly definable object of which the visible
appearances to us are the manifold semblance ; now by
one trait now by another the phantom before us lights up
that vague and haunting idea, and makes us utter its name
with a momentary sense of certitude and attainment.

Just so the individual beauties that charm our attention
and enchain the soul have only a transitive existence ;
they are momentary visions, irrecoverable moods. Their
object is unstable ; we never can say what it is, it changes
so quickly before our eyes. What is it that a mother
loves in her child ? Perhaps the babe not yet born, or
the child that grew long ago by her suffering and un
recognized care ; perhaps the man to be or the youth that
has been. What does a man love in a woman ? The
girl that is yet, perhaps, to be his, or the wife that once

102 LITTLE ESSAYS

chose to give him her whole existence. Where, among
all these glimpses, is the true object of love ? It flies
before us, it tempts us on, only to escape and turn to mock
us from a new quarter. And yet nothing can concern us
more or be more real to us than this mysterious good,
since the pursuit of it gives our lives whatever they have
of true earnestness and meaning, and the approach to it
whatever they have of joy.

So far is this ideal, Plato would say, from being an
illusion, that it is the source of the world, the power that
keeps us in existence. But for it, we should be dead.
A profound indifference, an initial torpor, would have kept
us from ever opening our eyes, and we should have no
world of business or pleasure, politics or science, to think
about at all. We, and the whole universe, exist only by
the passionate attempt to return to our perfection, by the
radical need of losing ourselves again in God. That
ineffable good is our natural possession ; all we honour
in this life is but the partial recovery of our birthright ;
every delightful thing is like a rift in the clouds through
which we catch a glimpse of our native heaven. If that
heaven seems so far away and the idea of it so dim and
unreal, it is because we are so far from self-knowledge, so
much immersed in what is alien and destructive to the soul.

44
IDEAL IMMORTALITY

THE more we reflect, the more we live in memory and idea,
the more convinced and penetrated we shall be by the
experience of death ; yet, as it is memory that enables
us to feel that we are dying and to know that everything
actual is in flux, so it is memory that opens to us an ideal
immortality, unacceptable and meaningless to the old
Adam, but genuine in its own way and undeniably true.
Memory does not reprieve or postpone the changes which
it registers, nor does it itself possess a permanent duration ;
it is, if possible, less stable and more mobile than primary
sensation. It is, in point of existence, only an internal

IDEAL IMMORTALITY 103

and complex kind of sensibility. But in intent and by its
significance it plunges to the depths of time ; it looks still
on the departed and bears witness to the truth that,
though absent from this part of experience, and incapable
of returning to life, they nevertheless existed once in their
own right, were as living and actual as experience is to
day, and still help to make up, in company with all past,
present, and future mortals, the filling and value of the
world.

As the pathos and heroism of life consists in accepting
as an opportunity the fate that makes our own death,
partial or total, serviceable to others, so the glory of life
consists in accepting the knowledge of natural death as an
opportunity to live in the spirit. The sacrifice, the self-
surrender, remains real ; for, though the compensation
is real, too, and at moments, perhaps, apparently over
whelming, it is always incomplete and leaves beneath
an incurable sorrow. Yet reflection is a vital function ;
memory and imagination have to the full the rhythm
and force of life. These faculties, in envisaging the past
or the ideal, envisage the eternal, and the man in whose
mind they predominate is to that extent detached in his
affections from the world of flux, from himself, and from
his personal destiny. This detachment will not make him
infinitely long-lived, nor absolutely happy, but it may
render him intelligent and just, and may open to him all
intellectual pleasures and all human sympathies.

Animal sensation is related to eternity only by the truth
that it has taken place. The fact, fleeting as it is, is
registered in ideal history, and no inventory of the world s
riches, no true confession of its crimes, would ever be
complete that ignored that incident. This indefeasible
character in experience makes a first sort of ideal immor
tality, one on which those rational philosophers like to
dwell who have not speculation enough to feel quite certain
of any other. It was a consolation to the Epicurean to
remember that, however brief and uncertain might be his
tenure of delight, the past was safe and the present sure.
" He lives happy," says Horace, " and master over himself,
who can say daily, I have lived. To-morrow let Jove
cover the sky with black clouds or flood it with sunshine ;

104 LITTLE ESSAYS

he shall not thereby render vain what lies behind, he shall
not delete and make never to have existed what once the
hour has brought in its flight." Such self-concentration
and hugging of the facts has no power to improve them ;
it gives to pleasure and pain an impartial eternity, and
rather tends to intrench in sensuous and selfish satisfactions
a mind that has lost faith in reason and that deliberately
ignores the difference in scope and dignity which exists
among various pursuits. Yet the reflection is staunch
and in its way heroic ; it meets a vague and feeble aspira
tion, that looks to the infinite, with a just rebuke ; it
points to real satisfactions, experienced successes, and
asks us to be content with the fulfilment of our own wills.
If you have seen the world, if you have played your game
and won it, what more would you ask for ? If you have
tasted the sweets of existence, you should be satisfied ;
if the experience has been bitter, you should be glad that
it comes to an end.

Of course, as we have seen, there is a primary demand
in man which death and mutation contradict flatly, so
that no summons to cease can ever be obeyed with com
plete willingness. Even the suicide trembles and the
ascetic feels the stings of the flesh. It is the part of
philosophy, however, to pass over those natural repug
nances and overlay them with as much countervailing
rationality as can find lodgment in a particular mind.
The Epicurean, having abandoned politics and religion
and being afraid of any far-reaching ambition, applied
philosophy honestly enough to what remained. Simple
and healthy pleasures are the reward of simple and healthy
pursuits ; to chafe against them because they are limited
is to import a foreign and disruptive element into the case ;
a healthy hunger has its limit, and its satisfaction reaches
a natural term. Philosophy, far from alienating us from
those values, should teach us to see their perfection and
to maintain them in our ideal. In other words, the happy
filling of a single hour is so much gained for the universe
at large, and to find joy and sufficiency in the flying
moment is perhaps the only means open to us for increasing
the glory of eternity.

Moving events, while remaining enshrined in this fashion

IDEAL IMMORTALITY 105

in their permanent setting, may contain other and less
external relations to the immutable. They may represent
it. If the pleasures of sense are not cancelled when they
cease, but continue to satisfy reason in that they once
satisfied natural desires, much more will the pleasures of
reflection retain their worth, when we consider that what
they aspired to and reached was no momentary physical
equilibrium but a permanent truth. As Archimedes, measur
ing the hypothenuse, was lost to events, being absorbed
in a fact of much greater transcendence, so art and science
interrupt the sense for change by engrossing attention in
its issues and its laws. Old age often turns pious to look
away from ruins to some world where youth endures and
where what ought to have been is not overtaken by decay
before it has quite come to maturity. Lost in such abstract
contemplations, the mind is weaned from mortal concerns.
It forgets for a few moments a world in which it has so
little more to do and so much, perhaps, still to suffer.
As a sensation of pure light would not distinguish itself
from the light it revealed, so a contemplation of things
not implicating time in their structure becomes, so far as
its own deliverance goes, a timeless existence. Uncon
sciousness of temporal conditions and of the very flight
of time makes the thinker sink for a moment into identity
with timeless objects. And so immortality, in a second
ideal sense, touches the mind.

The will, too, is an avenue to the eternal. What would
you have ? What is the goal of your endeavour ? It
must be some success, the establishment of some order,
the expression of some experience. These points once
reached, we are not left merely with the satisfaction of
abstract success. Being natural goals, these ideals are
related to natural functions. Their attainment does not
exhaust but merely liberates, in this one instance, the
function concerned, and so marks the perpetual point of
reference common to that function in all its fluctuations.
Every attainment of perfection in an art as for instance
in government makes a return to perfection easier for
posterity, since there remains an enlightening example,
together with faculties predisposed by discipline to recover
their ancient virtue. The better a man evokes and realizes

io6 LITTLE ESSAYS

the ideal the more he leads the life that all others, in
proportions to their worth, will seek to live after him, and
the more he helps them to live in that nobler fashion.
His presence in the society of immortals thus becomes,
so to speak, more pervasive. He not only vanquishes time
by his own rationality, living now in the eternal, but he
continually lives again in all rational beings.

Since the ideal has this perpetual pertinence to mortal
struggles, he who lives in the ideal and leaves it expressed
in society or in art enjoys a double immortality. The
eternal has absorbed him while he lived, and when he is
dead his influence brings others to the same absorption,
making them, through that ideal identity with the best
in him, reincarnations and perennial seats of all in him
which he could rationally hope to rescue from destruction.
He can say, without any subterfuge or desire to delude
himself, that he shall not wholly die ; for he will have a
better notion than the vulgar of what constitutes his being.
By becoming the spectator and confessor of his own death
and of universal mutation, he will have identified himself
with what is spiritual in all spirits and masterful in all
apprehension ; and so conceiving himself, he may truly
feel and know that he is eternal.

Nothing is eternal in its duration. The tide of evolution
carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies,
and persons no less than nations. Yet all things are
eternal in their status, as truth is. The place which an
event fills in history is its inalienable place ; the character
that an act or a feeling possesses in passing is its inalienable
character. Now, the human mind is not merely animal,
not merely absorbed in the felt transition from one state
of life to another. It is partly synthetic, intellectual,
contemplative, able to look before and after and to see
fleeting things at once in their mutual relations, or, as
Spinoza expressed it, under the form of eternity. To see
things under the form of eternity is to see them in their
historic and moral truth, not as they seemed as they
passed, but as they remain when they are over. When
a man s life is over, it remains true that he has lived ; it
remains true that he has been one sort of man, and not
another. In the infinite mosaic of history that bit has its

IDEAL IMMORTALITY 107

unlading colour and its perpetual function and effect.
A man who understands himself under the form of eternity
knows the quality that eternally belongs to him, and knows
that he cannot wholly die, even if he would ; for when the
movement of his life is over, the truth of his life remains.
The fact of him is a part for ever of the infinite context
of facts. This sort of immortality belongs passively to
everything ; but to the intellectual part of man it belongs
actively also, because, in so far as it knows the eternity of
truth, and is absorbed in it, the mind lives in that eternity.
In caring only for the eternal, it has ceased to care for that
part of itself which can die. But this sort of immortality
is ideal only. He who, while he lives, lives in the eternal,
does not live longer for that reason. Duration has merely
dropped from his view ; he is not aware of or anxious
about it ; and death, without losing its reality, has lost
its sting. The sublimation of his interest rescues him, so
far as it goes, from the mortality which he accepts and
surveys. The animals are mortal without knowing it,
and doubtless presume, in their folly, that they will live for
ever. Man alone knows that he must die ; but that very
knowledge raises him, in a sense, above mortality, by
making him a sharer in the vision of eternal truth. He
becomes the spectator of his own tragedy ; he sympathizes
so much with the fury of the storm that he has not ears
left for the shipwrecked sailor, though that sailor were
his own soul. The truth is cruel, but it can be loved,
and it makes free those who have loved it.

PART III

LITTLE ESSAYS ON ART AND
POETRY

109

45
JUSTIFICATION OF ART

IT is no longer the fashion among philosophers to decry
art. Either its influence seems to them too slight to excite
alarm, or their systems are too lax to subject anything to
censure which has the least glamour or ideality about it.
Tired, perhaps, of daily resolving the conflict between
science and religion, they prefer to assume silently a har
mony between morals and art. Moral harmonies, however,
are not given ; they have to be made. The curse of super
stition is that it justifies and protracts their absence by
proclaiming their invisible presence. Of course a rational
religion could not conflict with a rational science ; and
similarly an art that was wholly admirable would neces
sarily play into the hand of progress. But as the real
difficulty in the former case lies in saying what religion and
what science would be truly rational, so here the problem
is how far extant art is a benefit to mankind, and how far,
perhaps, a vice or a burden.

That art is prima facie and in itself a good cannot be
doubted. It is a spontaneous activity, and that settles
the question. Yet the function of ethics is precisely to
revise prima facie judgments of this kind and to fix the
ultimate resultant of all given interests, in so far as they
can be combined. In the actual disarray of human life
and desire, wisdom consists in knowing what goods to
sacrifice and what simples to pour into the supreme mixture.
The extent to which aesthetic values are allowed to colour
the resultant or highest good is a point of great theoretic
importance, not only for art but for general philosophy.
If art is excluded altogether or given only a trivial role,
perhaps as a necessary relaxation, we feel at once that a

in

H2 LITTLE ESSAYS

philosophy so judging human arts is ascetic or post-rational.
It pretends to guide life from above and from without ; it
has discredited human nature and mortal interests, and
has thereby undermined itself, since it is at best but a
partial expression of that humanity which it strives to
transcend. If, on the contrary, art is prized as something
supreme and irresponsible, if the poetic and mystic glow
which it may bring seems its own complete justification,
then philosophy is evidently still pre-rational or, rather,
non-existent ; for the beasts that listened to Orpheus
belong to this school.

To be bewitched is not to be saved, though all the
magicians and aesthetes in the world should pronounce
it to be so. Intoxication is a sad business, at least for a
philosopher ; for you must either drown yourself altogether,
or else when sober again you will feel somewhat fooled by
yesterday s joys and somewhat lost in to-day s vacancy.
The man who would emancipate art from discipline and
reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art,
but in all existence. He is vexed at conditions of excel
lence that make him conscious of his own incompetence
and failure. Rather than consider his function, he pro
claims his self-sufficiency. A way foolishness has of reveng
ing itself is to excommunicate the world.

If a practice can point to its innocence, if it can absolve
itself from concern for a world with which it does not
interfere, it has justified itself to those who love it, though
it may not yet have recommended itself to those who do
not. Now art, more than any other considerable pursuit,
more even than speculation, is abstract and inconsequential.
Born of suspended attention, it ends in itself. It en
courages sensuous abstraction, and nothing concerns it
less than to influence the world. Nor does it really do so
in a notable degree. Social changes do not reach artistic
expression until after their momentum is acquired and
their other collateral effects are fully predetermined.
Scarcely is a school of art established, giving expression to
prevailing sentiment, when this sentiment changes and
makes that style seem empty and ridiculous. The expres
sion has little or no power to maintain the movement it
registers, as a waterfall has little or no power to bring more

JUSTIFICATION OF ART 113

water down. Currents may indeed cut deep channels; but
they cannot feed their own springs at least not until the
whole revolution of nature is taken into account.

In the individual, also, art registers passions without
stimulating them ; on the contrary, in stopping to depict
them it steals away their life ; and whatever interest and
delight it transfers to their expression it subtracts from
their vital energy. This appears unmistakably in erotic
and in religious art. Though the artist s avowed purpose
here be to arouse a practical impulse, he fails in so far as
he is an artist in truth ; for he then will seek to move the
given passions only through beauty, but beauty is a rival
object of passion in itself. Lascivious and pious works,
when beauty has touched them, cease to give out what is
wilful and disquieting in their subject and become alto
gether intellectual and sublime. There is a high breath-
lessness about beauty that cancels lust and superstition.
The artist, in taking the latter for his theme, renders them
innocent and interesting, because he looks at them from
above, composes their attitudes and surroundings harmoni
ously, and makes them food for the mind. Accordingly it
is only in a refined and secondary stage that active passions
like to amuse themselves with their aesthetic expression.
Unmitigated lustiness and raw fanaticism will snarl at
pictures. Representations begin to interest when crude
passions recede, and feel the need of conciliating liberal
interests and adding some intellectual charm to their dumb
attractions. Thus art, while by its subject it may betray
the preoccupations among which it springs up, embodies a
new and quite innocent interest.

This interest is more than innocent ; it is liberal. Art
has met, on the whole, with more success than science or
morals. Beauty gives men the best hint of ultimate good
which their experience as yet can offer ; and the most
lauded geniuses have been poets, as if people felt that those
seers, rather than men of action or thought, had lived
ideally and known what was worth knowing. That such
should be the case, if the fact be admitted, would indeed
prove the rudimentary state of human civilization. The
truly comprehensive life should be the statesman s, for
whom perception and theory might be expressed and

I

H4 LITTLE ESSAYS

rewarded in action. The ideal dignity of art is therefore
merely symbolic and vicarious. As some people study
character in novels, and travel by reading tales of adven
ture, because real life is not yet so interesting to them as
fiction, or because they find it cheaper to make their
experiments in their dreams, so art in general is a rehearsal
of rational living, and recasts in idea a world which we have
no present means of recasting in reality. Yet this rehearsal
reveals the glories of a possible performance better than
do the miserable experiments until now executed on the
reality.

When we consider the present distracted state of govern
ment and religion, there is much relief in turning from them
to almost any art, where what is good is altogether and
finally good, and what is bad is at least not treacherous.
When we consider further the senseless rivalries, the
vanities, the ignominy that reign in the " practical " world,
how doubly blessed it becomes to find a sphere where
limitation is an excellence, where diversity is a beauty, and
where every man s ambition is consistent with every other
man s and even favourable to it ! It is indeed so in art ;
for we must not import into its blameless labours the
bickerings and jealousies of criticism. Critics quarrel with
other critics, and that is a part of philosophy. With an
artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour
of a child s eyes. As nature, being full of seeds, rises into
all sorts of crystallizations, each having its own ideal and
potential life, each a nucleus of order and a habitation for
the absolute self, so art, though in a medium poorer than
pregnant matter, and incapable of intrinsic life, generates
a semblance of all conceivable beings. What nature does
with existence, art does with appearance ; and while the
achievement leaves us, unhappily, much where we were
before in all our efficacious relations, it entirely renews our
vision and breeds a fresh world in fancy, where all form has
the same inner justification that all life has in the real
world. As no insect is without its rights and every cripple
has his dream of happiness, so no artistic fact, no child of
imagination, is without its small birthright of beauty. In
this freer element, competition does not exist and every
thing is Olympian. Hungry generations do not tread

JUSTIFICATION OF ART 115

down the ideal but only its spokesmen or embodiments,
that have cast in their lot with other material things.
Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature
seldom affords in concrete experience the union of life
and peace.

46
THE PLACE OF ART IN MORAL ECONOMY

How great a portion of human energies should be spent
on art and its appreciation is a question to be answered
variously by various persons and nations. There is no
ideal a priori ; an ideal can but express, if it is genuine, the
balance of impulses and potentialities in a given soul. A
mind at once sensuous and mobile will find its appropriate
perfection in studying and reconstructing objects of sense.
Its rationality will appear chiefly on the plane of percep
tion, to render the circle of visions which makes up its life
as delightful as possible. For such a man art will be the
most satisfying, the most significant activity, and to load
him with material riches or speculative truths or profound
social loyalties will be to impede and depress him. The
irrational is what does not justify itself in the end ; and
the born artist, repelled by the soberer and bitterer passions
of the world, may justly call them irrational. They would
not justify themselves in his experience ; they make
grievous demands and yield nothing in the end which is
intelligible to him. His picture of them, if he be a drama
tist, will hardly fail to be satirical ; fate, frailty, illusion
will be his constant themes. If his temperament could
find political expression, he would minimise the machinery
of life and deprecate any calculated prudence. He would
trust the heart, enjoy nature, and not frown too angrily
on inclination. Such a Bohemia he would regard as an
ideal world in which humanity might flourish congenially.
A puritan moralist, before condemning such an infantile
paradise, should remember that a commonwealth of
butterflies actually exists. It is not any inherent wrong-
ness in such an ideal that makes it unacceptable, but only
the fact that human butterflies are not wholly mercurial

n6 LITTLE ESSAYS

and that even imperfect geniuses are but an extreme type
in a society whose guiding ideal is based upon a broader
humanity than the artist represents. Men of science or
business will accuse the poet of folly, on the very grounds
on which he accuses them of the same. Each will seem to
the other to be obeying a barren obsession. The statesman
or philosopher who should aspire to adjust their quarrel
could do so only by force of intelligent sympathy with
both sides, and in view of the common conditions in which
they find themselves. What ought to be done is that
which, when done, will most nearly justify itself to all
concerned. Practical problems of morals are judicial and
political problems. Justice can never be pronounced with
out, hearing the parties and weighing the interests at stake.
A circumstance that complicates such a calculation is
this : aesthetic and other interests are not separable units,
to be compared externally ; they are rather strands inter
woven in the texture of everything. ^Esthetic sensibility
colours every thought, qualifies every allegiance, and
modifies every product of human labour. Consequently
the love of beauty has to justify itself not merely intrinsi
cally, or as a constituent part of life more or less to be
insisted upon ; it has to justify itself also as an influence.
A hostile influence is the most odious of things. The enemy
himself, the alien creature, lies in his own camp, and in a
speculative moment we may put ourselves in his place and
learn to think of him charitably ; but his spirit in our own
souls is like a private tempter, a treasonable voice weaken
ing our allegiance to our own duty. A zealot might allow
his neighbours to be damned in peace, did not a certain
heretical odour emitted by them infect the sanctuary and
disturb his own dogmatic calm. In the same way prac
tical people might leave the artist alone in his oasis, and
even grant him a pittance on which to live, as they feed
the animals in a zoological garden, did he not intrude into
their inmost conclave and vitiate the abstract cogency of
their designs. It is not so much art in its own field that
men of science look askance upon, as the love of glitter and
rhetoric and false finality trespassing upon scientific ground ;
while men of affairs may well deprecate a rooted habit of
sensuous absorption and of sudden transit to imaginary

THE PLACE OF ART IN MORAL ECONOMY 117

worlds, a habit which must work havoc in their own sphere.
In other words, there is an element of poetry inherent
in thought, in conduct, in affection ; and we must ask
ourselves how far this ingredient is an obstacle to their
proper development.

To criticize art on moral grounds is to pay it a high
compliment by assuming that it aims to be adequate, and
is addressed to a comprehensive mind. The only way in
which art could disallow such criticism would be to protest
its irresponsible infancy, and admit that it was a more or
less amiable blatancy in individuals, and not art at all.
Young animals often gambol in a delightful fashion, and
men also may, though hardly when they intend to do so.
Sportive self-expression can be prized because human
nature contains a certain elasticity and margin for experi
ment, in which waste activity is inevitable and may be
precious : for this license may lead, amid a thousand
failures, to some real discovery and advance. Art, like
life, should be free, since both are experimental. But it
is one thing to make room for genius and to respect the
sudden madness of poets through which, possibly, some
god may speak, and it is quite another not to judge the
result by rational standards. The bowels of the earth are
full of all sorts of rumblings ; which of the oracles drawn
thence is true can be judged only by the light of day. If
an artist s inspiration has been happy, it has been so because
his work can sweeten or ennoble the mind and because its
total effect will be beneficent. Art being a part of life, the
criticism of art is a part of morals.

47
RARENESS OF ESTHETIC FEELING

MEN are habitually insensible to beauty. Tomes of sesthetic
criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intui
tion. It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty
smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual
comfort to remembering her past favours. An aesthetic
glow may pervade experience, but that circumstance is

n8 LITTLE ESSAYS

seldom remarked ; it figures only as an influence working
subterraneously on thoughts and judgments which in
themselves take a cognitive or practical direction. Only
when the aesthetic ingredient becomes predominant do we
exclaim, How beautiful ! Ordinarily the pleasures which
formal perception gives remain an undistinguished part of
our comfort or curiosity.

Taste is formed in those moments when aesthetic emotion
is massive and distinct ; preferences then grown conscious,
judgments then put into words, will reverberate through
calmer hours ; they will constitute prejudices, habits of
apperception, secret standards for all other beauties. A
period of life in which such intuitions have been frequent
may amass tastes and ideals sufficient for the rest of our
days. Youth in these matters governs maturity, and
while men may develop their early impressions more
systematically and find confirmations of them in various
quarters, they will seldom look at the world afresh or use
new categories in deciphering it. Half our standards come
from our first masters, and the other half from our first
loves. Never being so deeply stirred again, we remain
persuaded that no objects save those we then discovered
can have a true sublimity. These high-water marks of
aesthetic life may easily be reached under tutelage. It may
be some eloquent appreciations read in a book, or some
preference expressed by a gifted friend, that may have
revealed unsuspected beauties in art or nature ; and then,
since our own perception was vicarious and obviously
inferior in volume to that which our mentor possessed,
we shall take his judgments for our criterion, since they
were the source and exemplar of all our own. Thus the
volume and intensity of some appreciations, especially
when nothing of the kind has preceded, makes them
authoritative over our subsequent judgments. On those
warm moments hang all our cold systematic opinions ;
and while the latter fill our days and shape our careers it
is only the former that are crucial and alive.

ART AND HAPPINESS 119

48
ART AND HAPPINESS

THE value of art lies in making people happy, first in
practising the art and then in possessing its product. This
observation might seem needless, and ought to be so ; but
if we compare it with what is commonly said on these
subjects, we must confess that it may often be denied and
more often, perhaps, may not be understood. Happiness
is something men ought to pursue, although they seldom
do so ; they are drawn away from it at first by foolish
impulses and afterwards by perverse laws. To secure
happiness conduct would have to remain spontaneous
while it learned not to be criminal ; but the fanatical
attachment of men, now to a fierce liberty, now to a false
regimen, keeps them barbarous and wretched. A rational
pursuit of happiness which is one thing with progress or
with the life of reason would embody that natural piety
which leaves to the episodes of life their inherent values,
mourning death, celebrating love, sanctifying civic tradi
tions, enjoying and correcting nature s ways. To dis
criminate happiness is therefore the very soul of art, which
expresses experience without distorting it, as those political
or metaphysical tyrannies distort it which sanctify un-
happiness. A free mind, like a creative imagination,
rejoices at the harmonies it can find or make between man
and nature ; and, where it finds none, it solves the conflict
so far as it may and then notes and endures it with
a shudder.

49
UTILITY AND BEAUTY

THERE would be a kind of superstitious haste in the notion
that what is convenient and economical is necessarily and
by miracle beautiful. The uses and habits of one place
and society require works which are or may easily become
intrinsically beautiful ; the uses and habits of another
make these beautiful works impossible. The beauty has

120 LITTLE ESSAYS

a material and formal basis ; no fitness of design will
make a building of ten equal storeys as beautiful as a
pavilion or a finely-proportioned tower ; no utility will
make a steamboat as beautiful as a sailing vessel. But the
forms once established, with their various intrinsic char
acters, the fitness we know to exist in them will lend them
some added charm, or their unfitness will disquiet us, and
haunt us like a conscientious qualm. The other interests
of our lives here mingle with the purely aesthetic, to enrich
or to embitter it.

If Sybaris is so sad a name to the memory and who is
without some Sybaris of his own ? if the image of it is so
tormenting and in the end so disgusting, this is not because
we no longer think its marbles bright, its fountains cool,
its athletes strong, or its roses fragrant ; but because,
mingled with all these supreme beauties, there is the
ubiquitous shade of Nemesis, the sense of a vacant will and
a suicidal inhumanity. The intolerableness of this moral
condition poisons the beauty which continues to be felt.
If this beauty did not exist, and was not still desired, the
tragedy would disappear and Jehovah would be deprived
of the worth of his victim. The sternness of moral forces
lies precisely in this, that the sacrifices morality imposes
upon us are real, that the things it renders impossible are
still precious.

We are accustomed to think of prudence as estranging
us only from low and ignoble things ; we forget that utility
and the need of system in our lives are a bar also to the free
flights of the spirit. The highest instincts tend to dis
organization as much as the lowest, since order or benefit
is what practical morality everywhere insists upon, while
sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice. The constant
demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an
incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the
understanding. For this reason, utility keeps close watch
over beauty, lest in her wilfulness and riot she should offend
against our practical needs and ultimate happiness. And
when the conscience is keen, that which emits a sapor
haereticus becomes so initially horrible, that no beauty can
ever be discovered in it ; the senses and imagination are
in that case inhibited by the conscience.

UTILITY AND BEAUTY 121

For this reason, the doctrine that beauty is essentially
nothing but the expression of moral or practical good
appeals to persons of predominant moral sensitiveness, not
only because they wish it were the truth, but because it
largely describes the experience of their own minds, some
what warped in this particular. It will further be observed
that the moralists are much more able to condemn than to
appreciate the effects of the arts. Their taste is delicate
without being keen, for the principle on which they judge
is one which really operates to control and extend aesthetic
effects ; it is a source of expression and of certain nuances
of satisfaction ; but it is foreign to the stronger and more
primitive aesthetic values to which the same persons are
comparatively blind.

The extent to which aesthetic goods should be
sacrificed is, of course, a moral question ; for the function
of practical reason is to compare, combine, and harmonize
all our interests, with a view to attaining the greatest
satisfactions of which our nature is capable. We must
expect, therefore, that virtue should place the same re
straint upon all our passions not from superstitious
aversion to any one need, but from an equal concern for
them all. The consideration to be given to our aesthetic
pleasures will depend upon their greater or less influence
upon our happiness ; and as this influence varies in different
ages and countries, and with different individuals, it will
be right to let aesthetic demands count for more or for less
in the organization of life.

We may indeed, according to our personal sympathies,
prefer one type of creature to another. We may love the
martial, or the angelic, or the political temperament. We
may delight to find in others that balance of suscepti
bilities and enthusiasms which we feel in our own breast.
But no moral precept can require one species or individual
to change its nature in order to resemble another, since such
a requirement can have no power or authority over those
on whom we would impose it. All that morality can
require is the inward harmony of each life : and if we
still abhor the thought of a possible being who should be
happy without love, or knowledge, or beauty, the aversion
we ieel is not moral but instinctive, not rational but human.

122 LITTLE ESSAYS

What revolts us is not the want of excellence in that other
creature, but his want of affinity to ourselves. Could we
survey the whole universe, we might indeed assign to each
species a moral dignity proportionate to its general benefi
cence and inward wealth ; but such an absolute standard,
if it exists, is incommunicable to us ; and we are reduced
to judging of the excellence of every nature by its relation
to the human.

If things of moment are before us, we cannot stop to
play with symbols and figures of speech. Too much
eloquence in a diplomatic document, or in a familiar letter,
or in a prayer, is an offence not only against practical sense,
but also against taste. The occasion has tuned us to a
certain key of sentiment, and deprived us of the power to
respond to other stimuli. We cannot attend to them with
pleasure, and therefore they lose the beauty they might
elsewhere have had. They are offensive, not in themselves
for nothing is intrinsically ugly but by virtue of our
present demand for something different. A prison as gay
as a bazaar, a church as dumb as a prison, offend by their
failure to support by their aesthetic quality the moral
emotion with which we approach them. The arts must
study their occasions ; they must stand modestly aside
until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life. This
is the consequence of the superficial stratum on which they
flourish ; their roots, as we have seen, are not deep in the
world, and they appear only as unstable, superadded
activities, employments of our freedom, after the work of
life is done and the terror of it is allayed. They must,
therefore, fit their forms, like parasites, to the stouter
growths to which they cling.

Herein lies the greatest difficulty and nicety of art. It
must not only create things abstractly beautiful, but it
must conciliate all the competitors these may have to the
attention of the world, and must know how to insinuate
their charms among the objects of our passion. But this
subserviency and enforced humility of beauty is not
without its virtue and reward. If the aesthetic habit lie
under the necessity of respecting and observing our passions,
it possesses the privilege of soothing our griefs. There is
no situation so terrible that it may not be relieved by the

UTILITY AND BEAUTY 123

momentary pause of the mind to contemplate it aestheti
cally.

Grief itself becomes in this way not wholly pain ; a
sweetness is added to it by our reflection. The saddest
scenes may lose their bitterness in their beauty. This
ministration makes, as it were, the piety of the Muses, who
succour their mother, Life, and repay her for their nurture
by the comfort of their continual presence. The aesthetic
world is limited in its scope ; it must submit to the control
of the organizing reason, and not trespass upon more useful
and holy ground. The garden must not encroach upon
the corn-fields ; but the eye of the gardener may transform
the corn-fields themselves by dint of loving observation
into a garden of a soberer kind. By finding grandeur in
our disasters, and merriment in our mishaps, the aesthetic
sense thus mollifies both, and consoles us for the frequent
impossibility of a serious and perfect beauty.

50
GLIMPSES OF PERFECTION

NOTHING but the good of life enters into the texture of
the beautiful. What charms us in the comic, what stirs
us in the sublime and touches us in the pathetic, is a glimpse
of some good ; imperfection has value only as an incipient
perfection. Could the labours and sufferings of life be
reduced, and a better harmony between man and nature
be established, nothing would be lost to the arts ; for the
pure and ultimate value of the comic is discovery ; of the
pathetic, love ; of the sublime, exaltation ; and these would
still subsist. Indeed, they would all be increased ; and it
has ever been, accordingly, in the happiest and most pros
perous moments of humanity, when the mind and the world
were knit into a brief embrace, that natural beauty has been
best perceived and art has won its triumphs. But it
sometimes happens, in moments less propitious, that the
soul is subdued to what it works in, and loses its power of
idealization and hope. By a pathetic and superstitious

124 LITTLE ESSAYS

self -depreciation, we then punish ourselves for the imper
fection of nature. Awed by the magnitude of a reality
that we can no longer conceive as free from evil, we try to
assert that its evil also is a good ; and we poison the very
essence of the good to make its extension universal. We
confuse the causal connexion of those things in nature
which we call good or evil by an adventitious denomina
tion, with the logical opposition between good and evil
themselves ; because one generation makes room for
another, we say death is necessary to life ; and because
the causes of sorrow and joy are so mingled in this world,
we cannot conceive how, in a better world, they might
be disentangled.

This incapacity of the imagination to reconstruct the
conditions of life and build the frame of things nearer to
the heart s desire is fatal to a steady loyalty to what is
noble and fine. We surrender ourselves to a kind of mis
cellaneous appreciation, without standard or goal ; and
calling every vexatious apparition by the name of beauty,
we become incapable of discriminating its excellence or
feeling its value. We need to clarify our ideals, and enliven
our vision of perfection. No atheism is so terrible as the
absence of an ultimate ideal, nor could any failure of power
be more contrary to human nature than the failure of moral
imagination, or more incompatible with healthy life. For
we have faculties, and habits, and impulses. These are
the basis of our demands. And these demands, although
variable, constitute an ever-present intrinsic standard of
value by which we feel and judge. The ideal is immanent
in them ; for the ideal means that fulfilment in which
our faculties would find their freest employment and their
most congenial world. Perfection would be nothing but
life under those conditions. Accordingly our consciousness
of the ideal becomes distinct in proportion as we advance
in virtue and in proportion to the vigour and definiteness
with which our faculties work. When the vital harmony
is complete, when the act is pure, faith in perfection passes
into vision. That man is unhappy indeed, who in all his
life has had no glimpse of perfection, who in the ecstasy of
love, or in the delight of contemplation, has never been able
to say : It is attained. Such moments of inspiration are

GLIMPSES OF PERFECTION 125

the source of the arts, which have no higher function than
to renew them.

A work of art is indeed a monument to such a moment,
the memorial to such a vision ; and its charm varies with
its power of recalling us from the distractions of common
life to the joy of a more natural and perfect activity.

MERE ART

MERE sensation or mere emotion is an indignity to a mature
human being. When we eat, we demand a pleasant vista,
flowers, or conversation, and failing these we take refuge
in a newspaper. The monks, knowing that men should
not feed silently like stalled oxen, appointed some one to
read aloud in the refectory ; and the Fathers, obeying the
same civilized instinct, had contrived in their theology
intelligible points of attachment for religious emotion. A
refined mind finds as little happiness in love without
friendship as in sensuality without love ; it may succumb
to both, but it accepts neither. What is true of mere __
sensibility is no less true of mere fancy. Any absolute
work of art which serves no further purpose than to stimu
late an emotion has about it a certain luxurious and
visionary taint. We leave it with a blank mind, and a /
pang bubbles up from the very fountain of pleasures. Art, /
so long as it needs to be a dream, will never cease to provej
a disappointment. Its facile cruelty, its narcotic abstrac-
tion, can never sweeten the evils we return to at home ; it
can liberate half the mind only by leaving the other half
in abeyance.

52
COSTLINESS

THERE is no reason why cost, or the circumstances which
are its basis, should not, like other practical values.
heighten the tone of consciousness, and add to the pleasure

126 LITTLE ESSAYS

with which we view an object. In fact, such is our daily
experience ; for great as is the sensuous beauty of gems,
their rarity and price add an expression of distinction to
them, which they would never have if they were cheap.

The knowledge of cost, when expressed in terms of
money, is incapable of contributing to aesthetic effect, but
the reason is not so much that the suggested value is not
aesthetic, as that no real value is suggested at all. If we
reinterpret our price, however, and translate it back into
the facts which constitute it, into the materials employed,
their original place and quality, and the labour and art
which transformed them into the present thing, then we
add to the aesthetic value of the object by the expression
which we find in it, not of its price in money, but of its
human cost. We have now the consciousness of the
human values which it represents, and these values,
sympathetically present to the fancy, increase our present
interest and admiration. We feel a natural wonder in
what is rare and affects us with unusual sensations. What
comes from a far country carries our thoughts there, and
gains by the wealth and picturesqueness of its associations.
And that on which human labour has been spent, especially
if it was a labour of love, and is apparent in the product,
has one of the deepest possible claims to admiration. So
that the standard of cost, the most vulgar of all standards,
is such only when it remains empty and abstract. Let
the thoughts wander back and consider the elements
of value, and our appreciation, from being verbal and
commercial, becomes poetic and real. Our sense of what
lies behind any object, unlovely though that background
may be, gives interest and poignancy to that which is
present ; our attention and wonder are engaged, and a new
meaning and importance is added to such intrinsic beauty
as the object may possess.

53
THE STARS

To most people, I fancy, the stars are beautiful ; but if
you asked why, they would be at a loss to reply, until they

THE STARS 127

remembered what they had heard about astronomy, and
the great size and distance and possible habitation of those
orbs. The vague and illusive ideas thus aroused fall in
so well with the dumb emotion we were already feeling,
that we attribute this emotion to those ideas, and persuade
ourselves that the power of the starry heavens lies in the
suggestion of astronomical facts.

The idea of the insignificance of our earth and of the
incomprehensible multiplicity of worlds is indeed immensely
impressive ; it may even be intensely disagreeable. There
is something baffling about infinity ; in its presence the
sense of finite humility can never wholly banish the
rebellious suspicion that we are being deluded. Our
mathematical imagination is put on the rack by an
attempted conception that has all the anguish of a night
mare and probably, could we but awake, all its laughable
absurdity. But the obsession of this dream is an in
tellectual puzzle, not an aesthetic delight. Before the days
of Kepler the heavens declared the glory of the Lord ;
and we needed no calculation of stellar distances, no
fancies about a plurality of worlds, no image of infinite
spaces, to make the stars sublime.

Had we been taught to believe that the stars governed
our fortunes, and were we reminded of fate whenever we
looked at them, we should similarly tend to imagine that
this b elief was the source of their sublimity ; and if the
superstition were dispelled, we should think the interest
gone from the apparition. But experience would soon
undeceive us, and prove that the sensuous character of
the object was sublime in itself. For that reason the
parable of the natal stars governing our lives is such a
natural one to express our subjection to circumstances, and
can be transformed by the stupidity of disciples into a
literal tenet. In the same way, the kinship of the emotion
produced by the stars with the emotion proper to certain
religious moments makes the stars seem a religious object.
They become, like impressive music, a stimulus to worship.
But fortunately there are experiences which remain
untouched by theory, and which maintain the mutual
intelligence of men through the estrangements wrought
by intellectual and religious systems. When the super-

128 LITTLE ESSAYS

structures crumble, the common foundation of human
sentience and imagination is exposed beneath. Did not
the infinite, by this initial assault upon our senses, awe us
and overwhelm us, as solemn music might, the idea of it
would be abstract and mental like that of the infinitesimal,
and nothing but an amusing curiosity. The knowledge
that the universe is a multitude of minute spheres circling,
like specks of dust, in a dark and boundless void, might
leave us cold and indifferent, if not bored and depressed,
were it not that we identify this hypothetical scheme
with the visible splendour, the poignant intensity, and the
baffling number of the stars. So far is the object from
giving value to the impression, that it is here, as it must
always ultimately be, the impression that gives value to the
object. For all worth leads us back to actual feeling
somewhere, or else evaporates into nothing into a word
and a superstition.

Now, the starry heavens are very happily designed to
intensify the sensations on which their fascination must
rest. The continuum of space is broken into points,
numerous enough to give the utmost idea of multiplicity,
and yet so distinct and vivid that it is impossible not
to remain aware of their individuality. The sensuous,
contrast of the dark background blacker the clearer
the night and the more stars we can see with the palpitat
ing fire of the stars themselves, could not be exceeded by
any possible device.

Fancy a map of the heavens and every star plotted
upon it, even those invisible to the naked eye : why
would this object, as full of scientific suggestion surely as
the reality, leave us so comparatively cold ? The sense
of multiplicity is naturally in no way diminished by the
representation ; but the poignancy of the sensation, the
life of the light, are gone ; and with the dulled impression
the keenness of the emotion disappears. Or imagine the
stars, undiminished in number, without losing any of their
astronomical significance and divine immutability, mar
shalled in geometrical patterns ; say in a Latin cross,
with the words In hoc signo vinces in a scroll around them.
The beauty of the illumination would be perhaps increased,
and its import, practical, religious, and cosmic, would

THE STARS 129

surely be a little plainer ; but where would be the sublimity
of the spectacle ? Irretrievably lost : and lost because
the form of the object would no longer tantalize us with
its sheer multiplicity, and with the consequent overpower
ing sense of suspense and awe. Accordingly things which
have enough multiplicity, as the lights of a city seen across
water, have an effect similar to that of the stars, if less
intense ; whereas a star, if alone, because the multiplicity
is lacking, makes a wholly different impression. The
single star is tender, beautiful, and mild ; we can compare
it to the humblest and sweetest of things :

A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye,
Fair as a star when only one
Is shining in the sky.

It is, not only in fact but in nature, an attendant on
the moon, associated with the moon, if we may be so
prosaic here, not only by contiguity but also by similarity.

Fairer than Phoebe s sapphire-regioned star
Or vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky.

The same poet can say elsewhere of a passionate lover :

He arose

Ethereal, flashed, and like a throbbing star.
Amid the sapphire heaven s deep repose.

How opposite is all this from the cold glitter, the cruel
and mysterious sublimity of the stars when they are many !
With these we have no tender associations ; they make
us think rather of Kant who could hit on nothing else to
compare with his categorical imperative, perhaps because
he found in both the same baffling incomprehensibility and
the same fierce actuality. Such ultimate feelings are
sensations of physical tension.

54
MUSIC

THERE is in sounds such an exquisite and continuous
gradation in pitch, and such a measurable relation in

K

130 LITTLE ESSAYS

length, that an object almost as complex and describable
as a visible one can be built out of them. Not that a
musical composition exists in any mystical way, as a
portion of the music of the spheres, which no one is hearing ;
but that, for a critical philosophy, visible objects are
also nothing but possibilities of sensation. To the inner
man, a real world is merely the shadow of that assurance
of eventual experience which accompanies sanity. This
ideal objectivity can accrue to any mental figment that
has enough cohesion, substance, and individuality to be
describable and recognizable, and these qualities belong
no less to audible than to spatial ideas.

There is, accordingly, some justification in Schopen
hauer s speculative assertion that music repeats the entire
world of sense, and is a parallel method of expression of
the underlying substance or will. The world of sound is
certainly capable of infinite variety and, were our sense
developed, of infinite extensions, and it has as much as the
world of matter the power to interest us and to stir our
emotions. It was therefore potentially as full of mean
ing. But it has proved the less applicable and constant
apparition ; and, therefore, music, which builds with its
materials, while the purest and most impressive of the
arts, is the least human and instructive of them.

Music is essentially useless, as life is : but both lend
utility to their conditions. That the way in which idle
sounds run together should matter so much is a mystery
of the same order as the spirit s concern to keep a particular
body alive, or to propagate its life. Such an interest is,
from an absolute point of view, wholly gratuitous ; and
so long as the natural basis and expressive function of
spirit are not perceived, this mystery is baffling. In
truth the order of values inverts that of causes ; and
experience, in which all values lie, is an ideal resultant,
itself ineffectual, of the potencies it can conceive. Delight
in music is liberal ; it makes useful the organs and processes
that subserve it. We happen to breathe, and on that
account are interested in breathing ; and it is no greater
marvel that, happening to be subject to intricate musical
sensations, we should be in earnest about these too. The
human ear discriminates sounds with ease ; what it hears

MUSIC 131

is so diversified that its elements can be massed without
being confused, or can form a sequence having a character
of its own, to be appreciated and remembered. The eye
too has a field in which clear distinctions and relations
appear, and for that reason is an organ favourable to
intelligence ; but what gives music its superior emotional
power is its rhythmic advance. Time is a medium which
appeals more than space to emotion. Since life is itself
a flux, and thought an operation, there is naturally some
thing immediate and breathless about whatever flows and
expands. The visible world offers itself to our regard with
a certain lazy indifference. " Peruse me," it seems to say,
" if you will. I am here ; and even if you pass me by now
and later find it to your advantage to resurvey me, I may
still be here." The world of sound speaks a more urgent
language. It insinuates itself into our very substance,
and it is not so much the music that moves us as we that
move with it. Its rhythms seize upon our bodily life,
to accelerate or to deepen it ; and we must either become
inattentive altogether or remain enslaved.

This imperious function in music has lent it functions
which are far from aesthetic. Song can be used to keep in
unison many men s efforts, as when sailors sing as they
heave ; it can make persuasive and obvious sentiments
which, if not set to music, might seem absurd, as often in
love songs and in psalmody. It may indeed serve to
prepare the mind for any impression whatever, and render
the same more intense when it comes. Music was long
used before it was loved or people took pains to refine it.
It would have seemed as strange in primitive times to turn
utterance into a fine art as now to make aesthetic paces
out of mourning or child-birth. Primitive music is indeed
a wail and a parturition ; magical and suggestive as it may
be, for long ages it never bethinks itself to be beautiful.
It is content to furnish a contagious melancholy employ
ment to souls without a language and with little interest
in the real world. Barbaric musicians, singing and playing
together more or less at random, are too much carried
away by their performance to conceive its effect; they
cry far too loud and too unceasingly to listen. A contagious
tradition carries them aiong and controls them, in a way,

132 LITTLE ESSAYS

as they improvise ; the assembly is hardly an audience ;
all are performers, and the crowd is only a stimulus that
keeps every one dancing and howling in emulation. This
unconsidered flow of early art remains present, more or less,
to the end. Instead of vague custom we have schools,
and instead of swaying multitudes academic example ;
but many a discord and mannerism survive simply because
the musician is so suggestible, or so lost in the tumult of
production, as never to reconsider what he does, or to
perceive its wastefulness.

Nevertheless an inherent value exists in all emitted
sounds, although barbaric practice and theory are slow
to recognize it. Each tone has its quality, like jewels of
different water ; every cadence has its vital expression,
no less inherent in it than that which comes in a posture
or in a thought. Everything audible thrills merely by
sounding, and though this perceptual thrill be at first
overpowered by the effort and excitement of action, yet it
eventually fights its way to the top. Participation in
music may become perfunctory or dull for the great
majority, as when hymns are sung in church ; a mere
suggestion of action will doubtless continue to colour the
impression received, for a tendency to act is involved in
perception ; but this suggestion will be only an over-tone
or echo behind an auditory feeling. Some performers
will be singled out from the crowd ; those whom the
public likes to hear will be asked to continue alone ; and
soon a certain suasion will be exerted over them by the
approval or censure of others, so that consciously or
unconsciously they will train themselves to please.

Popular music needs to be simple, although elaborate
music may be beautiful to the few. When elaborate
music is the fashion among people to whom all music is
a voluptuous mystery, we may be sure that what they
love is voluptuousness or fashion, and not music itself.
Beneath its hypnotic power, music, for the musician, has
an intellectual essence. Out of simple chords and melodies,
which at first catch only the ear, he weaves elaborate
compositions that by their form appeal also to the mind.
This side of music resembles a richer versification ; it may
be compared also to mathematics or to arabesques. A

MUSIC 133

moving arabesque that has a vital dimension, an audible
mathematics, adding sense to form, and a versification
that, since it has no subject-matter, cannot do violence to
it by its complex artifices these are types of pure living,
altogether joyful and delightful things. They combine
life with order, precision with spontaneity ; the flux in
them has become rhythmical and its freedom has passed
into a rational choice, since it has come in sight of the
eternal form it would embody. The musician, like an
architect or goldsmith working in sound, but freer than
they from material trammels, can expand for ever his
yielding labyrinth ; every step opens up new vistas, every
decision how unlike those made in real life ! multiplies
opportunities, and widens the horizon before him, without
preventing him from going back at will to begin afresh at
any point, to trace the other possible paths leading thence
through various magic landscapes. Pure music is pure
art. Its extreme abstraction is balanced by its entire
spontaneity, and, while it has no external significance, it
bears no internal curse. It is something to which a few
spirits may well surrender themselves, sure that in a liberal
commonwealth they will be thanked for their ideal labour,
the fruits of which many may enjoy. Such excursions
into ultra-mundane regions, where order is free, refine
the mind and make it familiar with perfection. By
analogy an ideal form comes to be conceived and desiderated
in other regions, where it is not produced so readily, and
the music heard, as the Pythagoreans hoped, makes the soul
also musical.

It must be confessed, however, that a world of sounds
and rhythms, all about nothing, is a by-world and a mere
distraction for a political animal. Its substance is air,
though the spell of it may have moral affinities. Neverthe
less this ethereal art may be enticed to earth and married
with what is mortal. Music interests humanity most
when it is wedded to human events. The alliance comes
about through the emotions which music and life arouse
in common. For sound, in sweeping through the body
and making felt there its kinetic and potential stress,
provokes no less interest than does any other physical
event or premonition. Music can produce emotion as

134 LITTLE ESSAYS

directly as can fighting or love. Nor is music the only
idle cerebral commotion that enlists attention and presents
issues no less momentous for being quite imaginary ;
dreams do the same, and seldom can the real crises of life
so absorb the soul, or prompt it to such extreme efforts,
as can delirium in sickness, or delusion in what passes for
health.

There is perhaps no emotion incident to human life
that music cannot render in its abstract medium by
suggesting the pang of it ; though of course music cannot
describe the complex situation which lends earthly passions
their specific colour. The passions, as music renders them,
are always general. But music has its own substitute for dis
tinct representation. It makes feeling specific, nay, more
delicate and precise than. association with things could make
it, by uniting it with musical form. We may say that besides
suggesting abstractly all ordinary passions, music creates a
new realm of form far more subtly impassioned than is vulgar
experience. Human life is confined to a dramatic repertory
which has already become somewhat classical and worn,
but music has no end of new situations, shaded in infinite
ways ; it moves in all sorts of bodies to all sorts of adven
tures. In life the ordinary routine of destiny beats so
emphatic a measure that it does not allow free play to
feeling ; we cannot linger on anything long enough to
exhaust its meaning, nor can we wander far from the
beaten path to catch new impressions. But in music
there are no mortal obligations, no imperious needs calling
us back to reality. Here nothing beautiful is extravagant,
nothing delightful unworthy. Musical refinement finds
no limit but its own instinct, so that a thousand shades
of what, in our blundering words, we must call sadness
or mirth, find in music their distinct expression. Each
phrase, each composition, articulates perfectly what no
human situation could embody. These fine emotions
are really new ; they are altogether musical and unex
ampled in practical life ; they are native to the passing
cadence, absolute postures into which it throws the soul.

Thus music is a means of giving form to our inner
feelings without attaching them to events or objects
in the world. Music is articulate, but articulate in a

MUSIC 135

language which avoids, or at least veils, the articulation
of the world we live in ; it is, therefore, the chosen art
of a mind to whom the world is still foreign. If this seems
in one way an incapacity, it is also a privilege. Not to
be at home in the world, to prize it chiefly for echoes
which it may have in the soul, to have a soul that can give
forth echoes, or that can generate internal dramas of
sound out of its own resources may this not be a more
enviable endowment than that of a mind all surface,
a sensitive plate only able to photograph this not too
beautiful earth ? Music serves to keep alive the con
viction, which a confused experience might obscure, that
perfection is essentially possible ; it reminds us that there
are worlds far removed from the actual which are yet living
and very near to the heart.

Emotion is initially about nothing and much of it
remains about nothing to the end. What rescues a part
of our passions from this pathological plight and lends
them some other function than merely to be, is the ideal
relevance which they sometimes acquire. All experience
is pathological if we consider its ground, but a part of
it is also rational if we consider its import. The art of
distributing interest among the occasions and vistas of
life so as to lend them a constant worth, and at the same
time to give feeling an intelligible object, is at bottom
the sole business of education ; but the undertaking is
long, and much feeling remains unemployed and un
justified. This objectless emotion chokes the heart with
its dull importunity ; now it impedes right action, now
it feeds and fattens illusion. Much of it radiates from
primary functions which, though their operation is half
known, have only base or pitiful associations in human
life ; so that they trouble us with deep and subtle cravings,
the unclaimed Hinterland of life. When music, either
by verbal indications or by sensuous affinities, or by both
at once, succeeds in tapping this fund of suppressed feeling,
it accordingly supplies a great need. It makes the dumb
speak, and plucks from the animal heart potentialities
of expression which might render it, perhaps, even more
than human.

By its emotional range music is appropriate to all

136 LITTLE ESSAYS

intense occasions : we dance, pray, and mourn to music,
and the more inadequate words or external acts are to
the situation, the more grateful music is. As the only
bond between music and life is emotion, music is out of
place only where emotion itself is absent. If it breaks
in upon us in the midst of study or business it becomes an
interruption or alternative to our activity, rather than
an expression of it ; we must either remain inattentive
or pass altogether into the realm of sound (which may
be unemotional enough) and become musicians for the
nonce. Music brings its sympathetic ministry only to
emotional moments. There is often in what moves us
a certain ruthless persistence, together with a certain
poverty of form ; the power felt is out of proportion to
the interest awakened, and attention is kept, as in pain,
at once strained and idle. At such a moment music is
a blessed resource. Without attempting to remove a
mood that is perhaps inevitable, it gives it a congruous
filling. Thus the mood is justified by an illustration or
expression which seems to offer some objective and ideal
ground for its existence ; and the mood is at the same
time relieved by absorption in that impersonal object.
So entertained, the feeling settles. The passion to which
at first we succumbed is now tamed and appropriated.
We have digested the foreign substance in giving it a
rational form ; its energies are merged in that strength
by which we freely operate.

In this way the most abstract of arts serves the dumbest
emotions. Music is like those branches which some trees
put forth close to the ground, far below the point where
the other boughs separate ; almost a tree by itself, it
has nothing but the root in common with its parent.
Somewhat in this fashion music diverts into an abstract
sphere a part of those forces which abound beneath the
point at which human understanding grows articulate.
It flourishes on saps which other branches of ideation are
too narrow or rigid to take up. Those elementary sub
stances the musician can spiritualize by his special methods,
taking away their reproach and redeeming them from blind
intensity.

There is consequently in music a sort of Christian

MUSIC 137

piety, in that it comes not to call the just but sinners to
repentance, and understands the spiritual possibilities
in outcasts from the respectable world. If we look at
things absolutely enough, and from their own point of
view, there can be no doubt that each has its own ideal
and does not question its own justification. Lust and
frenzy, reverie or despair, fatal as they may be to a creature
that has ulterior interests, are not perverse in themselves :
each searches for its own affinities, and has a kind of inertia
which tends to maintain it in being, and to attach or
draw in whatever is propitious to it. Feelings are as
blameless as so many forms of vegetation ; they can be
poisonous only to a different life. They are all primordial
motions, eddies which the universal flux makes for no
reason, since its habit of falling into such attitudes is the
ground-work and exemplar for nature and logic alike.
That such strains should exist is an ultimate datum ;
justification cannot be required of them, but must be
offered to each of them in turn by all that enters its particu
lar orbit. There is no will but might find a world to dis
port itself in and to call good, and thereupon boast that
it had created the order in which it found itself expressed.
But such satisfaction has been denied to the majority ;
the equilibrium of things has at least postponed their
day. Yet they are not altogether extinguished. Many
ill-suppressed possibilities endure in matter, and peep
into being through the crevices, as it were, of the dominant
world. Weeds they are called by the tyrant, but in them
selves they are aware of being potential gods. Why
should not every impulse expand in a congenial paradise ?
Why should each, made evil now only by an adventitious
appellation or a contrary fate, not vindicate its own ideal ?
If there is a piety towards things deformed, because it is
not they that are perverse, but the world that by its laws
and arbitrary standards decides to treat them as if they
were, how much more should there be a piety towards
things altogether lovely, when it is only space and matter
that are wanting for their perfect realization ?

138 LITTLE ESSAYS

55
THE ESSENCE OF LITERATURE

To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.
Music, which in a certain sense is a mass of pure forms,
must leave its " ideas " imbedded in their own medium
they are musical ideas and cannot impose them on any
foreign material, such as human affairs. Science, on the
contrary, seeks to disclose the bleak anatomy of existence,
stripping off as much as possible the veil of prejudice
and words. Literature takes a middle course and tries
to subdue music, which for its purposes would be futile
and too abstract, into conformity with general experience,
making music thereby significant. Literary art in the
end rejects all unmeaning flourishes, all complications
that have no counterpart in the things of this world or
no use in expressing their relations ; at the same time
it aspires to digest that reality to which it confines itself,
making it over into ideal substance and material for the
mind. It looks at natural things with an incorrigibly
dramatic eye, turning them into permanent unities (which
they never are) and almost into persons, grouping them by
their imaginative or moral affinities and retaining in them
chiefly what is incidental to their being, namely, the part
they may chance to play in man s adventures.

Such literary art demands a subject-matter other than the
literary impulse itself. The literary man is an interpreter
and hardly succeeds, as the musician may, without experi
ence and mastery of human affairs. His art is half genius
and half fidelity. He needs inspiration ; he must wait for
automatic musical tendencies to ferment in his mind,
proving it to be fertile in devices, comparisons, and bold
assimilations. Yet inspiration alone will lead him astray,
for his art is relative to something other than its own
formal impulse ; it comes to clarify the real world, not
to encumber it ; and it needs to render its native agility
pertinent to the facts and to attach its volume of feeling
to what is momentous in human life. Literature has its
piety, its conscience ; it cannot long forget, without

THE ESSENCE OF LITERATURE 139

forfeiting all dignity, that it serves a burdened and per
plexed creature, a human animal struggling to persuade
the universal Sphinx to propose a more intelligible riddle.
Irresponsible and trivial in its abstract impulse, man s
simian chatter becomes noble as it becomes symbolic ;
its representative function lends it a serious beauty, its
utility endows it with moral worth.

56
THE NEED OF POETRY

WHY do our practical men make room for religion in the
background of their world ? Why did Plato, after banish
ing the poets, poetize the universe in his prose ? Because
the abstraction by which the world of science and of
practice is drawn out of our experience, is too violent to
satisfy even the thoughtless and vulgar ; the ideality of our
views of nature, the conventionality of the drama we
call the world, are too glaring not to be somehow perceived
by ah 1 . Each must sometimes fall back upon the soul ;
he must challenge this apparition with the thought of
death ; he must ask himself for the mainspring and value
of his life. He will then remember his stifled loves ; he
will feel that only his illusions have ever given him a sense
of reality, only his passions the hope and the vision of
peace. He will read himself through and almost gather a
meaning from his experience ; at least he will half believe
that all he has been dealing with was a dream and a symbol,
and raise his eyes toward the truth beyond.

This plastic moment of the mind, when we become
aware of the artificiality and inadequacy of what common
sense conceives, is the true moment of poetic opportunity,
an opportunity, we may hasten to confess, which is
generally missed. The strain of attention, the concentra
tion and focussing of thought on the unfamiliar immediacy
of things, usually brings about nothing but confusion.
We are dazed, we are filled with a sense of unutterable
things, luminous yet indistinguishable, many yet one.
Instead of rising to imagination, we sink into mysticism.

140 LITTLE ESSAYS

To accomplish a mystical disintegration is not the
function of any art ; if any art seems to accomplish it,
the effect is only incidental, being involved, perhaps, in
the process of constructing the proper object of that art,
as we might cut down trees and dig them up by the roots
to lay the foundations of a temple. For every art looks
to the building up of something. And just because the
image of the world built up by common sense and natural
science is an inadequate image (a skeleton which needs
the filling of sensation before it can live), therefore the
moment when we realize its inadequacy is the moment when
the higher arts find their opportunity. When the world
is shattered to bits they can come and " build it nearer to
the heart s desire."

The great function of poetry is precisely this : to repair
to the material of experience, seizing hold of the reality of
sensation and fancy beneath the surface of conventional
ideas, and then out of that living but indefinite material
to build new structures, richer, finer, fitter to the primary
tendencies of our nature, truer to the ultimate possibilities
of the soul. Our descent into the elements of our being
is then justified by our subsequent freer ascent toward its
goal ; we revert to sense only to find food for reason ; we
destroy conventions only to construct ideals.

57
POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY

ARE poets at heart in search of a philosophy ? Or is
philosophy in the end nothing but poetry ? Let us
consider the situation.

The reasonings and investigations of philosophy are
arduous, and if poetry is to be linked with them, it can
be artificially only, and with a bad grace. But the vision
of philosophy is sublime. The order it reveals in the
world is something beautiful, tragic, sympathetic to the
mind, and just what every poet, on a small or on a large
scale, is always trying to catch.

In philosophy itself investigation and reasoning are

POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY 141

only preparatory and servile parts, means to an end.
They terminate in insight, or what in the noblest sense
of the word may be called theory, 0ea>pi a, a steady
contemplation of all things in their order and worth.
Such contemplation is imaginative. No one can reach
it who has not enlarged his mind and tamed his heart.
A philosopher who attains it is, for the moment, a poet ;
and a poet who turns his practised and passionate imagina
tion on the order of all things, or on anything in the light
of the whole, is for that moment a philosopher.

Nevertheless, even if we grant that the philosopher, in
his best moments, is a poet, we may suspect that the poet
has his worst moments when he tries to be a philosopher,
or rather, when he succeeds in being one. Philosophy is
something reasoned and heavy ; poetry something winged,
flashing, inspired. Take almost any longish poem, and
the parts of it are better than the whole. A poet is able
to put together a few words, a cadence or two, a single
interesting image. He renders in that way some moment
of comparatively high tension, of comparatively keen
sentiment. But at the next moment the tension is relaxed,
the sentiment has faded, and what succeeds is usually
incongruous with what went before, or at least inferior.
The thought drifts away from what it had started to be.
It is lost in the sands of versification. As man is now
constituted, to be brief is almost a condition of being
inspired.

Shall we say, then, and I now broach an idea by
which I set some store, that poetry is essentially short-
winded, that what is poetic is necessarily intermittent
in the writings of poets, that only the fleeting moment,
the mood, the episode, can be rapturously felt, or rap
turously rendered, while life as a whole, history, character,
and destiny are objects unfit for imagination to dwell on,
and repellent to poetic art ? I cannot think so. If it be
a fact, as it often is, that we find little things pleasing
and great things arid and formless, and if we are better
poets in a line than in an epic, that is simply due to lack
of faculty on our part, lack of imagination and memory,
and above all to lack of discipline.

This might be shown, I think, by psychological analysis,

r 4 2 LITTLE ESSAYS

if we cared to rely on something so abstract and so debatable.
For in what does the short-winded poet himself excel
the common unimaginative person who talks or who
stares ? Is it that he thinks even less ? Rather, I suppose,
in that he feels more ; in that his moment of intuition,
though fleeting, has a vision, a scope, a symbolic some
thing about it that renders it deep and expressive. Inten
sity, even momentary intensity, if it can be expressed at
all, comports fullness and suggestion compressed into that
intense moment. Yes, everything that comes to us at
all must come to us at some time or other. It is always
the fleeting moment in which we live. To this fleeting
moment the philosopher, as well as the poet, is actually
confined. Each must enrich it with his endless vistas,
vistas necessarily focussed, if they are to be disclosed at
all, in the eye of the observer, here and now. What makes
the difference between a moment of poetic insight and a
vulgar moment is that the passions of the poetic moment
have more perspective. Even the short-winded poet
selects his words so that they have a magic momentum
in them which carries us, we know not how, to mountain-
tops of intuition. Is not the poetic quality of phrases
and images due to their concentrating and liberating
the confused promptings left in us by a long experience ?
When we feel the poetic thrill, is it not that we find sweep
in the concise and depth in the clear, as we might find all
the lights of the sea in the water of a jewel ? And what is
a philosophic thought but such an epitome ?

If a short passage is poetical because it is pregnant
with suggestion of a few things, which stretches our atten
tion and makes us rapt and serious, how much more poetical
ought a vision to be which was pregnant with all we care
for ? Focus a little experience, give some scope and depth
to your feeling, and it grows imaginative ; give it more
scope and more depth, focus all experience within it, make
it a philosopher s vision of the world, and it will grow
imaginative in a superlative degree, and be supremely
poetical. The difficulty, after having the experience to
symbolize, lies only in having enough imagination to hold
and suspend it in a thought ; and further to give this
thought such verbal expression that others may be able

POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY 143

to decipher it, and to be stirred by it as by a wind of
suggestion sweeping the whole forest of their memories.

Poetry, then, is not poetical for being short-winded
or incidental, but, on the contrary, for being comprehensive
and having range. If too much matter renders it heavy,
that is the fault of the poet s weak intellect, not of the
outstretched world. A quicker eye, a more synthetic
imagination, might grasp a larger subject with the same
ease. As in a supreme dramatic crisis all our life seems
to be focussed in the present, and used in colouring our
consciousness and shaping our decisions, so for each philo
sophic poet the whole world of man is gathered together ;
and he is never so much a poet as when, in a single cry,
he summons all that has affinity to him in the universe,
and salutes his ultimate destiny. It is the acme of life
to understand life. The height of poetry is to speak the
language of the gods.

There is a kind of sensualism or sestheticism that has
decreed in our day that theory is not poetical ; as if all
the images and emotions that enter a cultivated mind
were not saturated with theory. The prevalence of such a
sensualism or sestheticism would alone suffice to explain the
impotence of the arts. The life of theory is not less human
or less emotional than the life of sense ; it is more typically
human and more keenly emotional. Philosophy is a more
intense sort of experience than common life is, just as
pure and subtle music, heard in retirement, is something
keener and more intense than the howling of storms or
the rumble of cities. For this reason philosophy, when
a poet is not mindless, enters inevitably into his poetry,
since it has entered into his life ; or rather, the detail of
things and the detail of ideas pass equally into his verse,
when both alike lie in the path that has led him to his
ideal. To object to theory in poetry would be like objecting
to words there ; for words, too, are symbols without the
sensuous character of the things they stand for ; and yet
it is only by the net of new connexions which words
throw over things, in recalling them, that poetry arises
at all. Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo
of crude experience ; it is itself a theoretic vision of things
at arm s length.

144 LITTLE ESSAYS

Heard philosophies are sweet, but those unheard may
be sweeter. They may be more unmixed and more pro
found for being adopted unconsciously, for being lived
rather than taught. This is not merely to say what
might be said of every work of art and of every natural
object, that it could be made the starting-point for a
chain of inferences that should reveal the whole universe,
like the flower in the crannied wall. It is to say, rather,
that the vital straining towards an ideal, definite but
latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that
ideal more fully than could the best-chosen words.

58
THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY

IF poetry in its higher reaches is more philosophical than
history, because it presents the memorable types of men
and things apart from unmeaning circumstances, so in its
primary substance and texture poetry is more philosophical
than prose because it is nearer to our immediate experience.
Poetry breaks up the trite conceptions designated by
current words into the sensuous qualities out of which
those conceptions were originally put together. We name
what we conceive and believe in, not what we see ; things,
not images ; souls, not voices and silhouettes. This
naming, with the whole education of the senses which it
accompanies, subserves the uses of life ; in order to thread
our way through the labyrinth of objects which assault us,
we must make a great selection in our sensuous experience ;
half of what we see and hear we must pass over as in
significant, while we piece out the other half with such an
ideal complement as is necessary to turn it into a fixed
and well-ordered conception of the world. This labour
of perception and understanding, this spelling of the
material meaning of experience, is enshrined in our worka
day language and ideas ; ideas which are literally poetic
in the sense that they are " made " (for every conception
in an adult mind is a fiction), but which are at the same

THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY 145

time prosaic because they are made economically, by
abstraction, and for use.

When the child of poetic genius, who has learned this
intellectual and utilitarian language in the cradle, goes
afield and gathers for himself the aspects of nature, he
begins to encumber his mind with the many living impres
sions which the intellect rejected, and which the language
of the intellect can hardly convey ; he labours with his
nameless burden of perception, and wastes himself in
aimless impulses of emotion and reverie, until finally the
method of some art offers a vent to his inspiration, or to
such part of it as can survive the test of time and the
discipline of expression.

The poet retains by nature the innocence of the eye,
or recovers it easily ; he disintegrates the fictions of
common perception into their sensuous elements, gathers
these together again into chance groups as the accidents of
his environment or the affinities of his temperament may
conjoin them ; and this wealth of sensation and this
freedom of fancy, which make an extraordinary ferment in
his ignorant heart, presently bubble over into some kind
of utterance.

The fullness and sensuousness of such effusions bring
them nearer to our actual perceptions than common
discourse could come ; yet they may easily seem remote,
overloaded, and obscure to those accustomed to think
entirely in symbols, and never to be interrupted in the
algebraic rapidity of their thinking by a moment s pause
and examination of heart, nor ever to plunge for a moment
into that torrent of sensation and imagery over which the
bridge of prosaic associations habitually carries us safe
and dry to some conventional act. How slight that
bridge commonly is, how much an affair of trestles and
wire, we can hardly conceive until we have trained our
selves to an extreme sharpness of introspection. But
psychologists have discovered, what laymen generally
will confess, that we hurry by the procession of our mental
images as we do by the traffic of the street, intent on
business, gladly forgetting the noise and movement of
the scene, and looking only for the corner we would turn
or the door we would enter. Yet in our alertest moment

146 LITTLE ESSAYS

the depths of the soul are still dreaming ; the real world
stands drawn in bare outline against a background of
chaos and unrest. Our logical thoughts dominate experi
ence only as the parallels and meridians make a checker
board of the sea. They guide our voyage without con
trolling the waves, which toss for ever in spite of our
ability to ride over them to our chosen ends. Sanity is a
madness put to good uses ; waking life is a dream controlled.
Out of the neglected riches of this dream the poet
fetches his wares. He dips into the chaos that underlies
the rational shell of the world and brings up some super
fluous image, some emotion dropped by the way, and
reattaches it to the present object ; he reinstates things
unnecessary, he emphasizes things ignored, he paints in
again into the landscape the tints which the intellect has
allowed to fade from it. If he seems sometimes to obscure
a fact, it is only because he is restoring an experience.
The first element which the intellect rejects in forming
its ideas of things is the emotion which accompanies the
perception ; and this emotion is the first thing the poet
restores. He stops at the image, because he stops to enjoy.
He wanders into the bypaths of association because the
bypaths are delightful. The love of beauty which made
him give measure and cadence to his words, the love of
harmony which made him rhyme them, reappear in his
imagination and make him select there also the material
that is itself beautiful, or capable of assuming beautiful
forms. The link that binds together the ideas, sometimes
so wide apart, which his wit assimilates, is most often the
link of emotion ; they have in common some element of
beauty or of horror.

59
POETRY AND PROSE

POETRY, while truly poetical, never loses sight of initial
feelings and underlying appeals ; it is incorrigibly tran
scendental, and takes every present passion and every
private dream in turn for the core of the universe. By

POETRY AND PROSE 147

creating new signs, or by recasting and crossing those
which have become conventional, it keeps communication
massive and instinctive, immersed in music, and inex
haustible by clear thought.

Lying is a privilege of poets because they have not
yet reached the level on which truth and error are dis
cernible. Veracity and significance are not ideals for a
primitive mind ; we learn to value them as we learn to
live, when we discover that the spirit cannot be wholly
free and solipsistic. To have to distinguish fact from
fancy is so great a violence to the inner man that not
only poets, but theologians and philosophers, still protest
against such a distinction. They urge (what is perfectly
true for a rudimentary creature) that facts are mere con
ceptions and conceptions full-fledged facts ; but this in
teresting embryonic lore they apply, in their intellectual
weakness, to retracting or undermining those human cate
gories which, though alone fruitful or applicable in life,
are not congenial to their half-formed imagination.
Retreating deeper into the inner chaos, they bring to
bear the whole momentum of an irresponsible dialectic
to frustrate the growth of representative ideas. In this
they are genuine, if somewhat belated, poets, experi
menting anew with solved problems, and fancying how
creation might have moved upon other lines.

The great merit that prose shares with science is that
it is responsible. Its conscience is a new and wiser imagina
tion, by which creative thought is rendered cumulative
and progressive ; for a man does not build less boldly
or solidly if he takes the precaution of building in baked
brick. Prose is in itself meagre and bodiless, merely
indicating the riches of the world. Its transparency helps
us to look through it to the issue, and the signals it gives
fill the mind with an honest assurance and a prophetic
art far nobler than any ecstasy.

As men of action have a better intelligence than poets,
if only their action is on a broad enough stage, so the prosaic
rendering of experience has the greater value, if only the
experience rendered covers enough human interests.
Youth and aspiration indulge in poetry ; a mature and
masterful mind will often despise it, and prefer to express

148 LITTLE ESSAYS

itself laconically in prose. It is clearly proper that prosaic
habits should supervene in this way on the poetical ; for
youth, being as yet little fed by experience, can find volume
and depth only in the soul ; the half-seen, the supra-
mundane, the inexpressible, seem to it alone beautiful
and worthy of homage. Time modifies this sentiment
in two directions. It breeds lassitude and indifference
towards impracticable ideals, originally no less worthy
than the practicable. Ideals which cannot be realized,
and are not fed at least by partial realizations, soon grow
dormant. Life-blood passes to other veins ; the urgent
and palpitating interests of life appear in other quarters.
While things impossible thus lose their serious charm,
things actual reveal their natural order and variety ;
these not only can entertain the mind abstractly, but they
can offer a thousand material rewards in observation and
action. In their presence, a private dream begins to look
rather cheap and hysterical. Not that existence has any
dignity or prerogative in abstraction from will, but that
will itself, being elastic, grows definite and firm when it
is fed by success ; and its formed and expressible ideals
then put to shame the others, which have remained vague
for want of practical expression. Mature interests centre
on soluble problems and tasks capable of execution ; it
is at such points that the ideal can be really served. The
individual s dream straightens and reassures itself by
merging with the dream of humanity. To dwell, as
irrational poets do, on some private experience, on some
emotion without representative or ulterior value, then
seems a waste of time. Fiction becomes less interesting
than affairs, and poetry turns into a sort of incompetent
whimper, a childish foreshortening of the outspread world.
On the other hand, prose has a great defect, which is
abstractness. It drops the volume of experience in finding
bodiless algebraic symbols by which to express it. Prose
seems to be a use of language in the service of material
life. It would tend, in that case, to undermine its
own basis ; for in proportion as signals for action are
quick and efficacious they diminish their sensuous stimulus
and fade from consciousness. Were language such a set
of signals it would be something merely instrumental,

POETRY AND PROSE 149

which if made perfect ought to be automatic and uncon
scious. It would be a buzzing in the ears, not a music
native to the mind. Such a theory of language would
treat it as a necessary evil and would look forward hope
fully to the extinction of literature, in which it would
recognize no intrinsic value. There is of course no reason
to deprecate the use of vocables, or of any other material
agency, to expedite affairs ; but a fine art of speech has to
supervene upon a mere code of signals if speech is to add
any ultimate charm to life. Prose, could it be purely
indicative, would be ideally superfluous. A literary
prose accordingly owns a double allegiance, and its life
is amphibious. It must convey intelligence, but intelli
gence clothed in a language that lends the message an
intrinsic value, and makes it delightful to apprehend
apart from its importance in ultimate theory or practice.
Prose is in that measure a fine art. It might be called
poetry that had become pervasively representative, and
was altogether faithful to its rational function.

60
PRIMARY POETRY

THERE is both truth and illusion in the saying that primitive
poets are sublime. Genesis and the Iliad (works doubtless
backed by a long tradition) are indeed sublime. Primitive
men, having perhaps developed language before the other
arts, used it with singular directness to describe the chief
episodes of life, which was all that life as yet contained.
They had frank passions and saw- things from single points
of view. A breath from that early world seems to enlarge
our natures, and to restore to language, which we have
sophisticated, all its magnificence and truth. But there
is more, for language is spontaneous ; it constitutes an act
before it registers an observation. It gives vent to emotion
before it is adjusted to things external and reduced, as it
were, to its own echo rebounding from a refractory world.
The lion s roar, the bellowing of bulls, even the sea s
cadence has a great sublimity. Though hardly in itself

I 5 o LITTLE ESSAYS

poetry, an animal cry, when still audible in human language,
renders it also the unanswerable, the ultimate voice of
nature. Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost
sigh of the body. An intense, inhospitable mind, filled
with a single idea, in which all animal, social, and moral
interests are fused together, speaks a language of incom
parable force. Thus the Hebrew prophets, in their savage
concentration, poured into one torrent all that their souls
possessed or could dream of. What other men are wont
to pursue in politics, business, religion, or art, they
looked for from one wave of national repentance and
consecration. Their age, swept by this ideal passion,
possessed at the same time a fresh and homely vocabulary ;
and the result was an eloquence so elemental and combative,
so imaginative and so bitterly practical, that the world
has never heard its like. Such single-mindedness, with
such heroic simplicity in words and images, is hardly
possible in a late civilization. Cultivated poets are not
unconsciously sublime.

The sublimity of early utterances should not be hailed,
however, with unmixed admiration. It is a sublimity
born of defect or at least of disproportion. The will
asserts itself magnificently ; images, like thunderclouds,
seem to cover half the firmament at once. But such a will
is sadly inexperienced ; it has hardly tasted or even
conceived any possible or high satisfactions. Its lurid
firmament is poor in stars. To throw the whole mind
upon something is not so great a feat when the mind has
nothing else to throw itself upon. Every animal when
goaded becomes intense ; and it is perhaps merely the
apathy in which mortals are wont to live that keeps them
from being habitually sublime in their sentiments. The
sympathy that makes a sheep hasten after its fellows, in
vague alarm or in vague affection ; the fierce premonitions
that drive a bull to the heifer ; the patience with which
a hen sits on her eggs ; the loyalty which a dog shows
to his master what thoughts may not all these instincts
involve, which it needs only a medium of communication
to translate into poetry ?

Memorable nonsense, or sound with a certain hypnotic
power, is the really primitive and radical form of poetry.

PRIMARY POETRY 151

Nor is such poetry yet extinct : children still love and
compose it, and every genuine poet, on one side of his
genius, reverts to it from explicit speech. As all language
has acquired its meaning, and did not have it in the
beginning, so the man who launches a new locution, the
poet who creates a symbol, must do so without knowing
what significance it may eventually acquire, and con
scious at best only of the emotional background from
which it emerged. Pure poetry is pure experiment ; and
it is not strange that nine-tenths of it should be pure
failure. For it matters little what unutterable things
may have originally gone together with a phrase in the
dreamer s mind ; if they were not uttered and the phrase
cannot call them back, this verbal relic is none the richer
for the high company it may once have kept. Expressive
ness is a most accidental matter. What a line suggests
at one reading, it may never suggest again even to the
same person. For this reason, among others, poets are
partial to their own compositions ; they truly discover
there depths of meaning which exist for nobody else.
Those readers who appropriate a poet and make him their
own fall into a similar illusion ; they attribute to him
what they themselves supply, and whatever he reels out,
lost in his own personal reverie, seems to them, like sortes
biUicae, written to fit their own case.

Justice has never been done to Plato s remarkable
consistency and boldness in declaring that poets are
inspired by a divine madness and yet, when they trans
gress rational bounds, are to be banished from an ideal
republic, though not without some marks of platonic regard.
Instead of fillets, a modern age might assign them a coterie
of flattering dames, and instead of banishment, starvation ;
but the result would be the same in the end. A poet
is inspired because what occurs in his brain is a true
experiment in creation. His apprehension plays with
words and their meanings as nature, in any spontaneous
variation, plays with her own structure. A mechanical
force shifts the kaleidoscope ; a new direction is given to
growth or a new gist to signification. This inspiration,
moreover, is mad, being wholly ignorant of its own issue ;
and though it has a confused fund of experience and verbal

152 LITTLE ESSAYS

habit on which to draw, it draws on this fund blindly and
quite at random, consciously possessed by nothing but a
certain stress and pregnancy and the pains, as it were, of
parturition. Finally the new birth has to be inspected
critically by the public censor before it is allowed to live ;
most probably it is too feeble and defective to prosper
in the common air, or is a monster that violates some
primary rule of civic existence, tormenting itself to disturb
others.

Plato seems to have exaggerated the havoc which these
poetic dragons can work in the world. They are in fact
more often absurd than venomous, and no special legislation
is needed to abolish them. They soon die quietly of
universal neglect. The poetry that ordinarily circulates
among a people is poetry of a secondary and conventional
sort that propagates established ideas in trite metaphors.
Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing
her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.
As a tree in the autumn sheds leaves and seeds together,
so a ripening experience comes indifferently to various
manifestations, some barren and without further function,
others fit to carry the parent experience over into another
mind, and give it a new embodiment there. Expressive
ness in the former case is dead, like that of a fossil ; in
the latter it is living and efficacious, recreating its original.
The first is idle self-manifestation, the second rational
art.

A poet, spokesman of his full soul at a given moment,
cannot consider eventualities or think of anything but the
message he is sent to deliver, whether the world can then
hear it or not. God, he may feel sure, understands him,
and in the eternal the beauty he sees and loves immortally
justifies his enthusiasm. Nevertheless, critics must view
his momentary ebullition from another side. They do
not come to justify the poet in his own eyes ; he amply
relieves them of such a function. They come only to
inquire how significant the poet s expressions are for
humanity at large or for whatever public he addresses.
They come to register the social or representative value
of the poet s soul. His inspiration may have been an odd
cerebral rumbling, a perfectly irrecoverable and wasted

PRIMARY POETRY 153

intuition ; the exquisite quality it doubtless had to his
own sense is now not to the purpose. A work of art is
a public possession ; it is addressed to the world. By
taking on a material embodiment, a spirit solicits attention
and claims some kinship with the prevalent gods. Has
it, critics should ask, the affinities needed for such inter
course ? Is it humane, is it rational, is it friendly to the
rest of the soul ? To its inherent incommunicable charms
it must add a kind of courtesy. If it wants other approval
than its own, it cannot afford to regard no other aspiration.

61
THE SUPREME POET

THERE are two directions in which it seems fitting that
rational art should proceed, on the basis which a limited
experience can give it. Art may come to buttress a
particular form of life, or it may come to express it. All
that we call industry, science, business, morality, buttresses
our life ; it informs us about our conditions and adjusts
us to them ; it equips us for life ; it lays out the ground
for the game we are to play. This preliminary labour,
however, need not be servile. To do it is also to exercise
our faculties ; and in that exercise our faculties may grow
free, as the imagination of Lucretius, in tracing the
course of the atoms, dances and soars most congenially.
One extension of art, then, would be in the direction
of doing artistically, joyfully, sympathetically, whatever
we have to do. Literature in particular (which is involved
in history, politics, science, affairs) might be throughout
a work of art. It would become so not by being ornate,
but by being appropriate ; and the sense of a great pre
cision and justness would come over us as we read or
wrote. It would delight us ; it would make us see how
beautiful, how satisfying, is the art of being observant,
economical, and sincere. The philosophical or compre
hensive poet, like Homer, like Shakespeare, would be a poet
of business. He would have a taste for the world in which
he lived, and a clean view of it.

154 LITTLE ESSAYS

There remains a second form of rational art, that of
expressing the ideal towards which we would move under
these improved conditions. For as we react we manifest
an inward principle, expressed in that reaction. We have
a nature that selects its own direction, and the direction
in which practical arts shall transform the world. The
outer life is for the sake of the inner ; discipline is for the
sake of freedom, and conquest for the sake of self-possession.
This inner life is wonderfully redundant ; there is, namely,
very much more in it than a consciousness of those acts
by which the body adjusts itself to its surroundings. Am
farbigen A bglanz haben wir das Leben ; each sense has its
arbitrary quality, each language its arbitrary euphony
and prosody ; every game has its creative laws, every
soul its own tender reverberations and secret dreams.
Life has a margin of play which might grow broader, if
the sustaining nucleus were more firmly established in the
world. To the art of working well a civilized race would
add the art of playing well. To play with nature and make
it decorative, to play with the overtones of life and make
them delightful, is a sort of art. It is the ultimate, the
most artistic sort of art, but it will never be practised
successfully so long as the other sort of art is in a backward
state ; for if we do not know our environment, we shall
mistake our dreams for a part of it, and so spoil our science
by making it fantastic, and our dreams by making them
obligatory. The art and the religion of the past, as
we see conspicuously in Dante, have fallen into this
error. To correct it would be to establish a new
religion and a new art, based on moral liberty and on
moral courage.

Who shall be the poet of this double insight ? He has
never existed, but he is needed nevertheless. It is time
some genius should appear to reconstitute the shattered
picture of the world. He should live in the continual
presence of all experience, and respect it ; he should at the
same time understand nature, the ground of that experience ;
and he should also have a delicate sense for the ideal
echoes of his own passions, and for all the colours of his
possible happiness. All that can inspire a poet is contained
in this task, and nothing less than this task would exhaust

THE SUPREME POET 155

a poet s inspiration. We may hail this needed genius
from afar. Like the poets in Dante s limbo, when Virgil
returns among them, we may salute him, saying : Quorate
I altissimo poeta. Honour the most high poet, honour the
highest possible poet. But this supreme poet is in limbo
still.

PART IV

LITTLE ESSAYS ON
POETS AND PHILOSOPHERS

157

62

AGAINST PRYING BIOGRAPHERS

OUR ignorance of the life of a great writer is not, I think,
much to be regretted. His work preserves that part
of him which he himself would have wished to preserve.
Perfect conviction ignores itself, proclaiming the public
truth. To reach this no doubt requires a peculiar genius
which is called intelligence ; for intelligence is quickness
in seeing things as they are. But where intelligence is
attained, the rest of a man, like the scaffolding to a finished
building, becomes irrelevant. We do not wish it to inter
cept our view of the solid structure, which alone was
intended by the artist if he was building for others,
and was not a coxcomb. It is his intellectual vision that
the naturalist in particular wishes to hand down to posterity,
not the shabby incidents that preceded that vision in his
own person. These incidents, even if they were by chance
interesting, could not be repeated in us ; but the vision
into which the thinker poured his faculties, and to which
he devoted his vigils, is communicable to us also, and may
become a part of ourselves.

63
THE DEARTH OF GREAT MEN

WHEN chaos has penetrated into the moral being of nations
they can hardly be expected to produce great men. A
great man need not be virtuous nor his opinions right,
but he must have a firm mind, a distinctive, luminous
character ; if he is to dominate things something must

159

160 LITTLE ESSAYS

be dominant in him. We feel him to be great in that he
clarifies and brings to expression something which was
potential in the rest of us but which with our burden of
flesh and circumstance we were too torpid to utter. The
great man is a spontaneous variation in humanity ; but
not in any direction. A spontaneous variation might
be a mere madness or mutilation or monstrosity; in
finding the variation admirable we evidently invoke
some principle of order to which it conforms. Perhaps
it makes explicit what was preformed in us also ; as
when a poet finds the absolutely right phrase for a feeling,
or when nature suddenly astonishes us with a form of
absolute beauty. Or perhaps it makes an unprecedented
harmony out of things existing before, but jangled and
detached. The first man was a great man for this latter
reason ; having been an ape perplexed and corrupted
by his multiplying instincts, he suddenly found a new
way of being decent, by harnessing all those instincts
together, through memory and imagination, and giving
each in turn a measure of its due ; which is what we call
being rational. It is a new road to happiness, if you
have strength enough to castigate a little the various
impulses that sway you in turn. Why then is the martyr,
who sacrifices everything to one attraction, distinguished
from the criminal or the fool, who do the same thing ?
Evidently because the spirit that in the martyr destroys
the body is the very spirit which the body is stifling in
the rest of us ; and although his private inspiration may
be irrational, the tendency of it is not, but reduces the
public conscience to act before any one else has had the
courage to do so. Greatness is spontaneous ; simplicity,
trust in some one clear instinct, are essential to it ; but
the spontaneous variation must be in the direction of some
possible sort of order ; it must exclude and leave behind
what is incapable of being moralized. How, then, should
there be any great heroes, saints, artists, philosophers,
or legislators in an age when nobody trusts himself, or feels
any confidence in reason, in an age when the word dogmatic
is a term of reproach ? Greatness has character and
severity, it is deep and sane, it is distinct and perfect.
For this reason there is none of it to-day.

THE DEARTH OF GREAT MEN 161

There is indeed another kind of greatness, or rather
largeness of mind, which consists in being a synthesis of
humanity in its current phases, even if without prophetic
emphasis or direction : the breadth of a Goethe, rather
than the fineness of a Shelley or a Leopardi. But such
largeness of mind, not to be vulgar, must be impartial,
comprehensive, Olympian ; it would not be greatness if
its miscellany were not dominated by a clear genius and
if before the confusion of things the poet or philosopher
were not himself delighted, exalted, and by no means
confused. Nor does this presume omniscience on his
part. It is not necessary to fathom the ground or the
structure of everything in order to know what to make
of it. Stones do not disconcert a builder because he may
not happen to know what they are chemically ; and so
the unsolved problems of life and nature, and the Babel of
society, need not disturb the genial observer, though he
may be incapable of unravelling them. He may set these
dark spots down in their places, like so many caves or
wells in a landscape, without feeling bound to scrutinize
their depths simply because their depths are obscure.
Unexplored they may have a sort of lustre, explored they
might merely make him blind, and it may be a sufficient
understanding of them to know that they are not worth
investigating. In this way the most chaotic age and the
most motley horrors might be mirrored limpidly in a
great mind, as the Renaissance was mirrored in the works
of Raphael and Shakespeare ; but the master s eye
itself must be single, his style unmistakable, his visionary
interest in what he depicts frank and supreme. Hence
this comprehensive sort of greatness too is impossible
in an age when moral confusion is pervasive, when
characters are complex, undecided, troubled by the mere
existence of what is not congenial to them, eager to be
not themselves ; when, in a word, thought is weak and
the flux of things overwhelms it. The mind has forgotten
its proper function, which is to crown life by quickening
it into intelligence, and thinks if it could only prove that
it accelerated life, that might perhaps justify its existence ;
like a philosopher at sea who, to make himself useful,
should blow into the sail.

162 LITTLE ESSAYS

A great imaginative apathy has fallen on the mind.
One-half the learned world is amused in tinkering obsolete
armour, as Don Quixote did his helmet ; deputing it,
after a series of catastrophes, to be at last sound and
invulnerable. The other half, the naturalists who have
studied psychology and evolution, look at life from the
outside, and the processes of nature make them forget
her uses. Bacon indeed had prized science for adding
to the comforts of life, a function still commemorated by
positivists in their eloquent moments. Habitually, how
ever, when they utter the word progress it is, in their
mouths, a synonym for inevitable change, or at best for
change in that direction which they conceive to be on
the whole predominant. If they combine with physical
speculation some elements of morals, these are usually
purely formal, to the effect that happiness is to be pursued
(probably, alas ! because to do so is a psychological law) ;
but what happiness consists in we gather only from casual
observations or by putting together their national pre
judices and party saws.

The truth is that even this radical school, emancipated
as it thinks itself, is suffering from the after-effects of
supernaturalism. Like children escaped from school,
they find their whole happiness in freedom. They are
proud of how much they have rejected, as if a great wit
were required to do so ; but they do not know what they
want. If you astonish them by demanding what is their
positive ideal, further than that there should be a great
many people and that they should be all alike, they will
say at first that what ought to be is obvious, and later
they will submit the matter to a majority vote. They have
discarded the machinery in which their ancestors embodied
the ideal ; they have not perceived that those symbols
stood for the life of reason and gave fantastic and em
barrassed expression to what, in itself, is pure humanity ;
and they have thus remained entangled in the colossal
error that ideals are something adventitious and unmean
ing, not having a soil in mortal life nor a possible fulfil
ment there.

THE INTELLECT OUT OF FASHION 163

64
THE INTELLECT OUT OF FASHION

TRUSTFUL faith in evolution and a longing for intense
life are characteristic of contemporary sentiment, 1 but
they do not appear to be consistent with that contempt
for the intellect which is no less characteristic of it. Human
intelligence is certainly a product, and a late and highly
organized product, of evolution ; it ought apparently
to be as much admired as the eyes of molluscs or the
antennae of ants. And if life is better the more intense
and concentrated it is, intelligence would seem to be the
best form of life. But the degree of intelligence which
this age possesses makes it so very uncomfortable that,
in this instance, it asks for something less vital, and sighs
for what evolution has left behind. In the presence of
such cruelly distinct things as astronomy or such cruelly
confused things as theology it feels la nostalgie de la boue.
Finding their intelligence enslaved, our contemporaries
suppose that intelligence is essentially servile ; instead
of freeing it, they try to elude it. Their philosophy is an
effort to realize this revulsion, to disintegrate intelligence
and stimulate sympathetic experience. Its charm lies
in the relief which it brings to a stale imagination, an
imagination from which religion has vanished and which
is kept stretched on the machinery of business and society,
or on small half -borrowed passions which they clothe in
a mean rhetoric and dot with vulgar pleasures. Not free
enough themselves morally, but bound to the world partly
by piety and partly by industrialism, they cannot think
of rising to a detached contemplation of earthly things,
and of life itself and evolution ; they revert rather to
sensibility, and seek some by-path of instinct or dramatic
sympathy in which to wander. Having no stomach for
the ultimate, they burrow downwards towards the primi
tive. But the longing to be primitive is a disease of culture ;
it is archaism in morals. To be so preoccupied with vitality
is a symptom of anaemia.

1 Written in 1912.

164 LITTLE ESSAYS

When life was really vigorous and young, in Homeric
times for instance, no one seemed to fear that it might be
squeezed out of existence either by the incubus of matter
or by the petrifying blight of intelligence. Life was like
the light of day, something to use, or to waste, or to enjoy.
It was not a thing to worship ; and often the chief luxury
of living consisted in dealing death about vigorously.
Life indeed was loved, and the beauty and pathos of it
were felt exquisitely ; but its beauty and pathos lay in
the divineness of its model and in its own fragility. No
one paid it the equivocal compliment of thinking it a
substance or a material force. Nobility was not then
impossible in sentiment, because there were ideals in life
higher and more indestructible than life itself, which life
might illustrate and to which it might fitly be sacrificed.
Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to
live on anyhow and in any shape ; a spirit with any
honour is not willing to live except in its own way, and
a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.
In those days men recognized immortal gods and resigned
\ themselves to being mortal. Yet those were the truly
vital and instinctive days of the human spirit. Only
when vitality is low do people find material things oppres
sive and ideal things unsubstantial. Now there is more
motion than life, and more haste than force ; we are
driven to distraction by the ticking of the tiresome clocks,
material and social, by which we are obliged to regulate
our existence. We need ministering angels to fly to us
from somewhere, even if it be from the depths of proto
plasm. We must bathe in the currents of some non-
human vital flood, like consumptives in their last extremity
who must bask in the sunshine and breathe the mountain
air ; and our disease is not without its sophistry to con
vince us that we were never so well before, or so mightily
conscious of being alive.

Without great men and without clear convictions this
age is nevertheless very active intellectually ; it is studious,
empirical, inventive, sympathetic. Its wisdom consists
in a certain contrite openness of mind ; it flounders, but
at least in floundering it has gained a sense of possible
depths in all directions. Under these circumstances,

THE INTELLECT OUT OF FASHION 165

some triviality and great confusion in its positive achieve
ments are not unpromising things, nor even unamiable.
These are the Wander jahre of faith ; it looks smilingly
at every new face, which might perhaps be that of a pre
destined friend ; it chases after any engaging stranger ;
it even turns up again from time to time at home, full
of a new tenderness for all it had abandoned there. But
to settle down would be impossible now. The intellect,
the judgment are in abeyance. Life is running turbid
and full ; and it is no marvel that reason, after vainly
supposing that it ruled the world, should abdicate as
gracefully as possible, when the world is so obviously
the sport of cruder powers vested interests, tribal passions,
stock sentiments, and chance majorities. Having no
responsibility laid upon it, reason has become irresponsible.
Many critics and philosophers seem to conceive that
thinking aloud is itself literature. Sometimes reason
tries to lend some moral authority to its present masters,
by proving how superior they are to itself ; it worships
evolution, instinct, novelty, action. At other times it
retires into the freehold of those temperaments whom
this world has ostracized, the region of the non-existent,
and comforts itself with its indubitable conquests there.
Indeed, what happens to exist is too alien and accidental
to absorb all the play of a free mind, whose function, after
it has come to clearness and made its peace with things,
is to touch them with its own moral and intellectual light,
and to exist for its own sake.

65
ESSENCE AND EXISTENCE

LANGUAGE, with the logic embedded in it, is a repository
of terms fixed by identifying successive appearances, as
the external world is a repository of objects conceived
by superposing appearances that exist together. Being
formed on different principles these two orders of con
ception the logical and the physical do not coincide,
and the attempt to fuse them into one system of demon-

166 LITTLE ESSAYS

strable reality or moral physics is doomed to failure by
the very nature of the terms compared. When the
Eleatics proved the impossibility i.e., the inexpressibility
of motion, or when Kant and his followers proved the
imaginary character of all objects of experience and of all
natural knowledge, their task was made easy by the native
diversity between the concretions in existence which were
the object of their thought and the concretions in discourse
which were its measure. The two do not fit ; and intrenched
as these philosophers were in the forms of logic they com
pelled themselves to reject as unthinkable everything not
fully expressible in those particular forms. Thus they took
their revenge upon the vulgar who, being busy chiefly
with material things and dwelling in an atmosphere of
sensuous images, call unreal and abstract every product
of logical construction or reflective analysis. These
logical products, however, are not really abstract, but,
as we have said, concretions arrived at by a different
method than that which results in material conceptions.
Whereas the conception of a thing is a local conglomerate
of several simultaneous appearances, logical entity is
recognized by a fusion in memory of similar appearances
temporally distinct.

Thus the many armed with prejudice and the few armed
with logic fight an eternal battle, the logician charging
the physical world with unintelligibility and the man of
common-sense charging the logical world with abstractness
and unreality. The former view is the more profound,
since association by similarity is the more elementary and
gives constancy to meanings ; while the latter view is
the more practical, since association by contiguity alone
informs the mind about the mechanical sequence of its
own experience. Neither principle can be dispensed with,
and each errs only in denouncing the other and wishing to
be omnivorous, as if on the one hand logic could make
anybody understand the history of events and the con
junction of objects, or on the other hand as if cognitive
and moral processes could have any other terms than
constant and ideal natures. The namable essence of
things or the standard of values must always be an
ideal figment ; existence must always be an empirical

ESSENCE AND EXISTENCE 167

fact. The former remains always remote from natural
existence and the latter irreducible to a logical principle.

Reliance on external perception, constant appeals to
concrete fact and physical sanctions, have always led the
mass of reasonable men to magnify concretions in existence
and belittle concretions in discourse. They are too clever,
as they feel, to mistake words for things. The most
authoritative thinker on this subject, because the most
mature, Aristotle himself, taught that things had reality,
individuality, independence, and were the outer cause of
perception, while general ideas, products of association by
similarity, existed only in the mind. The public, pleased
at its ability to understand this doctrine and overlooking
the more incisive part of the philosopher s teaching, could
go home comforted and believing that material things were
primary and perfect entities, while ideas were only abstrac
tions, effects those realities produced on our incapable
minds. Aristotle, however, had a juster view of general
concepts and made in the end the whole material universe
gravitate around them and feel their influence, though in
a metaphysical and magic fashion to which a more advanced
natural science need no longer appeal. While in the shock
of life man was always coming upon the accidental, in the
quiet of reflection he could not but recast everything in
ideal moulds and retain nothing but eternal natures and
intelligible relations. Aristotle conceived that while the
origin of knowledge lay in the impact of matter upon
sense its goal was the comprehension of essences, and
that while man was involved by his animal nature in
the accidents of experience he was also by virtue of his
rationality a participator in eternal truth. A substantial
justice was thus done both to the conditions and to the
functions of human life, although, for want of a natural
history inspired by mechanical ideas, this double allegiance
remained somewhat baffling and incomprehensible in its
basis. Aristotle, being a true philosopher and pupil of
experience, preferred incoherence to partiality.

168 LITTLE ESSAYS

66
MALICIOUS PSYCHOLOGY

THE English psychologists who first disintegrated the idea
of substance did not study the question wholly for its
own sake or in the spirit of a science that aims at nothing
but a historical analysis of mind. They had a more or
less malicious purpose behind their psychology. They
thought that if they could once show how metaphysical
ideas are made they would discredit those ideas and banish
them for ever from the world. If they retained confidence
in any notion as Hobbes in body, Locke in matter and in
God, Berkeley in spirits, and Kant, the inheritor of this
malicious psychology, in the thing-in-itself and in heaven
it was merely by inadvertence or want of courage. The
principle of their reasoning, where they chose to apply it,
was always this, that ideas whose materials could all be
accounted for in consciousness and referred to sense or
to the operations of mind were thereby exhausted and
deprived of further validity. Only the unaccountable, or
rather the uncriticized, could be true. Consequently the
advance of psychology meant, in this school, the retreat
of reason ; for as one notion after another was clarified
and reduced to its elements it was ipso facto deprived of its
function. It became impossible to be at once quite serious
and quite intelligent ; for to use reason was to indulge in
subjective fiction, while conscientiously to abstain from
using it was to sink back upon inarticulate and brutish
instinct.

In Hume this sophistication was frankly avowed.
Philosophy discredited itself ; but a man of parts, who
loved intellectual games even better than backgammon,
might take a hand with the wits and historians of his day,
until the clock struck twelve and the party was over.
Even in Kant, though the mood was more cramped and
earnest, the mystical sophistication was quite the same.
Kant, too, imagined that the bottom had been knocked
out of the world. Since space and time could not repel
the accusation of being the necessary forms of perception,

MALICIOUS PSYCHOLOGY 169

space and time were not to be much thought of ; and
when the sad truth was disclosed that causality and the
categories were instruments by which the idea of nature
had to be constructed, if such an idea was to exist at all,
then nature and causality shrivelled up and were dishonoured
together ; so that, the soul s occupation being gone, she
must needs appeal to some mysterious oracle, some abstract
and irrelevant omen within the breast, and muster up all
the stern courage of an accepted despair to carry her
through this world of mathematical illusion into some
green and infantile paradise beyond.

67
ON ESSE EST PERCIPI

IN the melodramatic fashion so common in what is called
philosophy we may delight ourselves with such flashes
of lightning as this : esse est percipi. The truth of this
paradox lies in the fact that through perception alone can
we get at being a modest and familiar notion which
makes, as Plato s Theaetetus shows, not a bad point of
departure for a serious theory of knowledge. The
sophistical intent of it, however, is to deny our right to
make a distinction which in fact we do make and which the
speaker himself is making as he utters the phrase ; for he
would not be so proud of himself if he thought he was
thundering a tautology. If a thing were never perceived,
or inferred from perception, we should indeed never know
that it existed ; but after we become aware that we have
perceived or inferred it, it may remain conducive to
comprehension and practical competence to continue to
regard it as existing independently of our perception ;
and our ability to make this supposition is registered in
the difference between the two words to be and to be perceived
words which are by no means synonymous but designate
two very different relations of things to thought. Such
idealism at one fell swoop, through a collapse of assertive
intellect with a withdrawal of reason into self-conscious
ness, has the puzzling character of any clever pun, that

170 LITTLE ESSAYS

suspends the fancy between two incompatible but irre
sistible meanings. The art of such sophistry is to choose
for an axiom some ambiguous phrase which taken in one
sense is a truism and taken in another is an absurdity ;
and then, by showing the truth of that truism, to give out
that the absurdity has also been proved. It is a truism
to say that I am the only seat or locus of my ideas, and
that whatever I know is known by me ; it is an absurdity
to say that I am the only object of my thought and
perception.

To confuse the instrument with its function and the
operation with its meaning has been a persistent foible in
modern philosophy. It could thus come about that the
function of intelligence should be altogether misconceived
and in consequence denied, when it was discovered that
figments of reason could never become elements of sense
but must always remain, as of course they should, ideal
and regulative objects, and therefore objects to which a
practical and energetic intellect will tend to give the name
of realities. Matter is a reality to the practical intellect
because it is a necessary and ideal term in the mastery
of experience ; while negligible sensations, like dreams,
are called illusions by the same authority because, though
actual enough while they last, they have no sustained
function and no right to practical dominion.

68
KANT

KANT is remarkable among sincere philosophers for the
pathetic separation which existed between his personal
beliefs and his official discoveries. His personal beliefs
were mild and half orthodox and hardly differed from
those of Leibniz ; but officially he was entangled in the
subjective criticism of knowledge, and found that the
process of knowing was so complicated, and so exquisitely
contrived to make knowledge impossible, that while the
facts of the universe were there, and we might have, like
Leibniz, a shrewd and exact notion of what they were,

KANT 171

officially we had no right to call them facts or to allege
that we knew them. As there was much in Kant s personal
belief which this critical method of his could not sanction,
so there were implications and consequences latent in his
critical method which he never absorbed, being an old man
when he adopted it. One of these latent implications was
egotism..

The fact that each spirit was confined to its own per
ceptions condemned it to an initial subjectivity and
agnosticism. What things might exist besides his ideas
he could never know. That such things existed was not
doubted ; Kant never accepted that amazing principle
of dogmatic egotism that nothing is able to exist unless
I am able to know it. On the contrary he assumed that
human perceptions, with the moral postulates which he
added to them, were symbols of a real world of forces
or spirits existing beyond. This assumption reduced our
initial idiotism to a constitutional taint of our animal
minds, not unlike original sin, and excluded that romantic
pride and self-sufficiency in which a full-fledged transcen
dentalism always abounds.

To this contrite attitude of Kant s agnosticism his
personal character and ethics corresponded. A wizened
little old bachelor, a sedentary provincial scribe, scrupulous
and punctual, a courteous moralist who would have us
treat humanity in the person of another as an end and
never merely as a means, a pacifist and humanitarian who
so revered the moral sense according to Shaftesbury and
Adam Smith that, after having abolished earth and heaven,
he was entirely comforted by the sublime truth that never
theless it remained wrong to tell a lie such a figure has
nothing in it of the officious egotist or the superman.
Yet his very love of exactitude and his scruples about
knowledge, misled by the psychological fallacy that
nothing can be an object of knowledge except some idea
in the mind, led him in the end to subjectivism ; while
his rigid conscience, left standing in that unnatural void,
led him to attribute absoluteness to what he called the
categorical imperative. But this void outside and this
absolute oracle within are germs of egotism, and germs of
the most virulent species.

172 LITTLE ESSAYS

The categorical imperative, or unmistakable voice of
conscience, was originally something external enough
too external, indeed, to impose by itself a moral obligation.
The thunders of Sinai and the voice from the whirlwind in
Job fetched their authority from the suggestion of power ;
there spoke an overwhelming physical force of which we
were the creatures and the playthings, a voice which far
from interpreting our sense of justice, or our deepest hopes,
threatened to crush and to flout them. If some of its
commandments were moral, others were ritual or even
barbarous ; the only moral sanction common to them all
came from our natural prudence and love of life ; our
wisdom imposed on us the fear of the Lord. The prophets
and the gospel did much to identify this external divine
authority with the human conscience ; an identification
which required a very elaborate theory of sin and punish
ment and of existence in other worlds, since the actual
procedure of nature and history can never be squared with
any ideal of right.

In Kant, who in this matter followed Calvin, the
independence between the movement of nature, both
within and without the soul, and the ideal of right was
exaggerated into an opposition. The categorical imperative
was always authoritative, but perhaps never obeyed.
While matter and life moved on in their own unregenerate
way, a principle which they ought to follow, overarched
and condemned them, and constrained them to condemn
themselves. Human nature was totally depraved and
incapable of the least merit, nor had it any power of itself
to become righteous. Its amiable spontaneous virtues,
having but a natural motive, were splendid vices. Moral
worth began only when the will, transformed at the touch
of unmerited grace, surrendered every impulse in over
whelming reverence for the divine law.

This Calvinistic doctrine might seem to rebuke all
actual inclinations, and far from making the will morally
absolute, as egotism would, to raise over against it an alien
authority, what ought to be willed. Such was, of course,
Kant s ostensible intention ; but sublime as such a situation
was declared to be, he felt rather dissatisfied in its presence.
A categorical imperative crying in the wilderness, a duty

KANT 173

which nobody need listen to, or suffer for disregarding,
seemed rather a forlorn authority. To save the face of
absolute right another world seemed to be required, as in
orthodox Christianity, in which it might be duly vindicated
and obeyed.

Kant s scepticism, by which all knowledge of reality
was denied us, played conveniently into the hand of this
pious requirement. If the whole natural world, which we
can learn something about by experience, is merely an
idea in our minds, nothing prevents any sort of real but
unknown world from lying about us unawares. What
could be more plausible and opportune than that the
categorical imperative which the human mind, the builder
of this visible world, had rejected, should in that other
real world be the head stone of the corner ?

This happy thought, had it stood alone, might have
seemed a little fantastic ; but it was only a laboured means
of re-establishing the theology of Leibniz, in which Kant
privately believed, behind the transcendental idealism
which he had put forward professorially. The dogmatic
system from which he started seemed to him, as it stood,
largely indefensible and a little oppressive. To purify it
he adopted a fallacious principle of criticism, namely, that
our ideas are all we can know, a principle which, if carried
out, would undermine that whole system, and every other.
He, therefore, hastened to adopt a corrective principle of
reconstruction, no less fallacious, namely, that conscience
bids us assume certain things to be realities which reason
and experience know nothing of. This brought him round
to a qualified and ambiguous form of his original dogmas,
to the effect that although there was no reason to think
that God, heaven, and free-will exist, we ought to act as
if they existed, and might call that wilful action of ours
faith in their existence.

Thus in the philosophy of Kant there was a stimulating
ambiguity in the issue. He taught rather less than he
secretly believed, and his disciples, seizing the principle
of his scepticism, but lacking his conservative instincts,
believed rather less than he taught them. Doubtless in
his private capacity Kant hoped, if he did not believe,
that God, free-will, and another life subsisted in fact, as

174 LITTLE ESSAYS

every believer had hitherto supposed ; it was only the
method of proving their reality that had been illegitimate.
For no matter how strong the usual arguments might seem
(and they did not seem very strong) they could convey no
transcendent assurance ; on the contrary, the more proofs
you draw for anything from reason and experience, the
better you prove that that thing is a mere idea in your
mind. It was almost prudent, so to speak, that God,
freedom, and immortality, if they had claims to reality,
should remain without witness in the sphere of " know
ledge," as inadvertently or ironically it was still called ;
but to circumvent this compulsory lack of evidence God
had at least implanted in us a veridical conscience, which
if it took itself seriously (as it ought to do, being a conscience)
would constrain us to postulate what, though we could
never " know " it, happened to be the truth. Such was
the way in which the good Kant thought to play hide-and-
seek with reality.

Kant had a private mysticism in reserve to raise upon
the ruins of science and common-sense. Knowledge was
to be removed to make way for faith. This task is
ambiguous, and the equivocation involved in it is perhaps
the deepest of those confusions with which German
metaphysics has since struggled, and which have made
it waver between the deepest introspection and the
dreariest mythology. To substitute faith for knowledge
might mean to teach the intellect humility, to make it
aware of its theoretic and transitive function as a faculty
for hypothesis and rational fiction, building a bridge of
methodical inferences and ideal unities between fact and
fact, between endeavour and satisfaction. It might be to
remind us, sprinkling over us, as it were, the Lenten ashes
of an intellectual contrition, that our thoughts are air
even as our bodies are dust, momentary vehicles and
products of an immortal vitality in God and in nature,
which fosters and illumines us for a moment before it lapses
into other forms.

Had Kant proposed to humble and concentrate into
a practical faith the same natural ideas which had previously
been taken for absolute knowledge, his intention would
have been innocent, his conclusions wise, and his analysis

KANT 175

free from venom and arriere-pensee. Man, because of his
finite and propulsive nature and because he is a pilgrim
and a traveller throughout his life, is obliged to have faith :
the absent, the hidden, the eventual, is the necessary
object of his concern. But what else shall his faith rest
in except in what the necessary forms of his perception
present to him and what the indispensable categories of
his understanding help him to conceive ? What possible
objects are there for faith except objects of a possible
experience ? What else should a practical and moral
philosophy concern itself with, except the governance and
betterment of the human world ? It is surely by using
his only possible forms of perception and his inevitably
categories of understanding that man may yet learn, as he
has partly learned already, to live and prosper in the
universe. Had Kant s criticism amounted simply to such
a confession of the tentative, practical, and hypothetical
nature of human reason, it would have been wholly
acceptable to the wise ; and its appeal to faith would have
been nothing but an expression of natural vitality and
courage, just as its criticism of knowledge would have
been nothing but a better acquaintance with self. This
faith would have called the forces of impulse and passion
to reason s support, not to its betrayal. Faith would have
meant faith in the intellect, a faith naturally expressing
man s practical and ideal nature, and the only faith yet
sanctioned by its fruits.

Side by side with this reinstatement of reason, however,
which was not absent from Kant s system in its critical
phase and in its application to science, there lurked in his
substitution of faith for knowledge another and sinister
intention. He wished to blast as insignificant, because
" subjective," the whole structure of human intelligence,
with all the lessons of experience and all the triumphs of
human skill, and to attach absolute validity instead to
certain echoes of his rigoristic religious education. These
notions were surely just as subjective, and far more local
and transitory, than the common machinery of thought ;
and it was actually proclaimed to be an evidence of their
sublimity that they remained entirely without practical
sanction in the form of success or of happiness. The

176 LITTLE ESSAYS

"categorical imperative " was a shadow of the ten com
mandments ; the postulates of practical reason were the
minimal tenets of the most abstract Protestantism. These
fossils, found unaccountably imbedded in the old man s
mind, he regarded as the evidences of an inward but
supernatural revelation.

TRANSCENDENTALISM

THE legitimacy of the transcendental method is so obvious
that it is baffling when unfamiliar and trifling when under
stood. It is somewhat like the scientific discovery that
man is an animal ; for in spite of its pompous language
and unction, transcendentalism, when not transcended,
is a stopping short at the vegetative and digestive stage
of consciousness, where nothing seems to be anything
but a play of variations in the immediate. That is what
science has risen from ; it is the primordial slime. But
to stop there and make life consist in hearing the mind
work is illiberal and childish. Maturity lies in taking
reason at its word and learning to believe and to do what
it bids us. Inexperience, pedantry, and mysticism
three obstacles to wisdom were not absent from those
academic geniuses by whom transcendentalism was first
brought forth. They became consequently entangled in
their profundity, and never were masters of their purposes
or of their tools.

It was a thing taken for granted in ancient and scholastic
philosophy that a being dwelling, like man, in the im
mediate, whose moments are in flux, needed constructive
reason to interpret his experience and paint in his unstable
consciousness some symbolic picture of the world. To
have reverted to this constructive process and studied
its stages is an interesting achievement ; but the con
struction is already made by common-sense and science,
and it was visionary insolence in the Germans to propose
to make that construction otherwise. Retrospective self-
consciousness is dearly bought if it inhibits the intellect
and embarrasses the inferences which, in its spontaneous

TRANSCENDENTALISM 177

operation, it has known perfectly how to make. In the
heat of scientific theorizing or dialectical argument it is
sometimes salutary to be reminded that we are men think
ing ; but, after all, it is no news. We know that life is a
dream, and how should thinking be more ? Yet the
thinking must go on, and the only vital question is to
what practical or poetic conceptions it is able to lead us.

Such visions are necessarily fleeting, because the human
mind has long before settled its grammar, and discovered,
after much groping and many defeats, the general forms
in which experience will allow itself to be stated. These
general forms are the principles of common sense and
positive science, no less imaginative in their origin than
those notions which we now call transcendental, but
grown prosaic, like the metaphors of common speech, by
dint of repetition.

Since the material world is an object for thought, it
can hardly lie in the same plane of reality with the thought
to which it appears. The spectator on this side of the
foot-lights cannot expect to figure in the play or to see
himself strutting among the actors on the boards. He
listens and is served, being at once impotent and supreme.
It has been well said that

Only the free divine the laws,
The causeless only know the cause.

Conversely, what in such a transcendental sense is causeless
and free can evidently not be causal or determinant, being
something altogether universal and notional, without
inherent determinations or specific affinities. The objects
figuring in consciousness will have implications and will
require causes ; not so the consciousness itself. The
Ego to which all things appear equally, whatever their
form or history, is the ground of nothing incidental : no
specific characters or order found in the world can be
attributed to its efficacy. The march of experience is
not determined by the mere fact that experience exists.
Consciousness is not itself dynamic. It is merely an
abstract name for the actuality of its random objects.

To subjectify the universe is not to improve it, much
less to dissolve it. The space I call my idea has all the

N

178 LITTLE ESSAYS

properties of the space I called my environment ; it has
the same inevitable presence and the same perpetual
validity.

The whole transcendental philosophy, if made ultimate,
is false, and nothing but a private perspective. The will
is absolute neither in the individual nor in humanity.
Nature is not a product of the mind, but on the contrary
there is an external world, ages prior to any idea of it,
which the mind recognizes and feeds upon. There is a
steady human nature within us, which our moods and
passions may wrong but cannot annul. There is no
categorical imperative but only the operation of instincts
and interests more or less subject to discipline and mutual
adjustment. Our whole life is a compromise, an incipient
loose harmony between the passions of the soul and the
forces of nature, forces which likewise generate and protect
the souls of other creatures, endowing them with powers
of expression and self-assertion comparable with our own,
and with aims no less sweet and worthy in their own eyes ;
so that the quick and honest mind cannot but practise
courtesy in the universe, exercising its will without vehem
ence or forced assurance, judging with serenity, and in
everything discarding the word absolute as the most false
and the most odious of words. As Montaigne observes,
" He who sets before him, as in a picture, this vast image of
our mother Nature in her entire majesty ; who reads in
her aspect such universal and continual variety ; who
discerns himself therein, and not himself only but a whole
kingdom, to be but a most delicate dot he alone esteems
things according to the just measure of their greatness. *

70
PRECARIOUS RATIONALISMS

THE most legitimate constructions of reason soon become
merely speculative, soon pass, I mean, beyond the sphere
of practical application ; and the man of affairs, adjusting
himself at every turn to the opaque brutality of fact, loses
his respect for the higher reaches of logic and forgets

PRECARIOUS RATIONALISMS 179

that his recognition of facts themselves is an application
of logical principles. In his youth, perhaps, he pursued
metaphysics, which are the love-affairs of the under
standing ; now he is wedded to convention and seeks in
the passion he calls business or in the habit he calls duty
some substitute for natural happiness. He fears to question
the value of his life, having found that such questioning
adds nothing to his powers ; and he thinks the mariner
would die of old age in port who should wait for reason
to justify his voyage. Reason is indeed like the sad
Iphigenia whom her royal father, the Will, must sacrifice
before any wind can fill his sails. The emanation of all
things from the One involves not only the incarnation
but the crucifixion of the Logos. Reason must be eclipsed
by its supposed expressions, and can only shine in a darkness
which does not comprehend it. For reason is essentially
hypothetical and subsidiary, and can never constitute
what it expresses in man, nor what it recognizes in nature.
If logic should refuse to make this initial self-sacrifice
and to subordinate itself to impulse and fact, it would
immediately become irrational and forfeit its own justifica
tion. For it exists by virtue of a human impulse and in
answer to a human need. To ask a man, in the satisfaction
of a metaphysical passion, to forgo every other good is
to render him fanatical and to shut his eyes daily to the
sun in order that he may see better by the star-light.
The radical fault of rationalism is not any incidental error
committed in its deductions, although such necessarily
abound in every human system. Its great original sin
is its denial of its own basis and its refusal to occupy its
due place in the world, an ignorant fear of being invalidated
by its history and dishonoured, as it were, if its ancestry
is hinted at. Only bastards should fear that fate, and
criticism would indeed be fatal to a bastard philosophy,
to one that does not spring from practical reason and has
no roots in life. But those products of reason which
arise by reflection on fact, and those spontaneous and
demonstrable systems of ideas which can be verified in
experience, and thus serve to render the facts calculable
and articulate, will lose nothing of their lustre by dis
covering their lineage. So the idea of nature remains

i8o LITTLE ESSAYS

true after psychology has analysed its origin, and not only
true, but beautiful and beneficent. For unlike many
negligible products of speculative fancy it is woven out of
recurrent perceptions into a hypothetical cause from which
further perceptions can be deducted as they are actually
experienced. Such a mechanism once discovered confirms
itself at every breath we draw, and surrounds every object
in history and nature with infinite and true suggestions,
making it doubly interesting, fruitful, and potent over the
mind.

If the idealist fears and deprecates any theory of his
own origin and function, he is only obeying the instinct
of self-preservation ; for he knows very well that his
past will not bear examination. He is heir to every
superstition and by profession an apologist ; his deepest
vocation is to rescue, by some logical tour de force, what
spontaneously he himself would have taken for a conse
crated error. Zeal, here as in so many cases, becomes
the cover and evidence of a bad conscience. Bigotry and
craft, with a rhetorical vilification of enemies, then come
to reinforce in the prophet that natural limitation of his
interests which turns his face away from history and criti
cism ; until his system, in its monstrous unreality and
disingenuousness, becomes intolerable, and provokes a
general revolt in which too often the truth of it is buried
with the error in a common oblivion.

UNJUST JUDGMENTS

INJUSTICE in this world is not something comparative;
the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.
A bruised child wailing in the street, his small world for
the moment utterly black and cruel before him, does not
fetch his unhappiness from sophisticated comparisons or
irrational envy ; nor can any compensations and celestial
harmonies supervening later ever expunge or justify that
moment s bitterness. The pain may be whistled away
and forgotten ; the mind may be rendered by it only a

UNJUST JUDGMENTS 181

little harder, a little coarser, a little more secretive and
sullen and familiar with unrightable wrong. But ignoring
that pain will not prevent its having existed; it must
remain for ever to trouble God s omniscience and be a
part of that hell which the creation too truly involves.

If all unfortunate people could be proved to be uncon
scious automata, what a brilliant justification that would
be for the ways of both God and man ! Philosophy
would not lack arguments to support such an agreeable
conclusion. Beginning with the axiom that whatever
is is right, a metaphysician might adduce the truth that
consciousness is something self-existent and indubitably
real ; therefore, he would contend, it must be self -justifying
and indubitably good. And he might continue by saying
that a slave s life was not its own excuse for being, nor
were the labours of a million drudges otherwise justified
than by the conveniences which they supplied their masters
with. Ergo, those servile operations could come to con
sciousness only where they attained their end, and the
world could contain nothing but perfect and universal
happiness. A divine omniscience and joy, shared by
finite minds in so far as they might attain perfection,
would be the only Hie in existence, and the notion that
such a thing as pain, sorrow, or hatred could exist at all
would forthwith vanish like the hideous and ridiculous
illusion that it was. This argument may be recommended
to apologetic writers as no weaker than those they com
monly rely on, and infinitely more consoling.

The value which the world has in the eyes of its inhabi
tants is necessarily mixed, so that a sweeping optimism
or pessimism can be only a theoretic pose, false to the
natural sentiment even of those who assume it. Both
are impressionistic judgments passed on the world at large,
not perhaps without some impertinence. However good
or however bad the universe may be, it is always worth
while to make it better. But metaphysicians sometimes
so define the good as to make it a matter of no importance ;
not seldom they give that name to the sum of all evils.

182 LITTLE ESSAYS

72
MODERN POETRY

IT is an observation at first sight melancholy but in the
end, perhaps, enlightening, that the earliest poets are
the most ideal, and that primitive ages furnish the most
heroic characters and have the clearest vision of a perfect
life. The Homeric times must have been full of ignorance
and suffering. In those little barbaric towns, in those
camps and farms, in those shipyards, there must have
been much insecurity and superstition. That age was
singularly poor in all that concerns the convenience of
life and the entertainment of the mind with arts and
sciences. Yet it had a sense for civilization. That
machinery of life which men were beginning to devise
appealed to them as poetical ; they knew its ultimate
justification and studied its incipient processes with
delight. The poetry of that simple and ignorant age was,
accordingly, the sweetest and sanest that the world has
known ; the most faultless in taste, and the most even
and lofty in inspiration. Without lacking variety and
homeliness, it bathed all things human in the golden
light of morning ; it clothed sorrow in a kind of majesty,
instinct with both self-control and heroic frankness. No
where else can we find so noble a rendering of human
nature, so spontaneous a delight in life, so uncompromising
a dedication to beauty, and such a gift of seeing beauty
in everything. Homer, the first of poets, was also the
best and the most poetical.

From this beginning, if we look down the history of
occidental literature, we see the power of idealization
steadily decline. For while it finds here and there, as in
Dante, a more spiritual theme and a subtler and riper
intellect, it pays for that advantage by a more than equiva
lent loss in breadth, sanity, and happy vigour. And if
ever imagination bursts out with a greater potency, as
in Shakespeare (who excels the patriarch of poetry in
depth of passion and vividness of characterization, and in
those exquisite bubblings of poetry and humour in which

MODERN POETRY 183

English genius is at its best), yet Shakespeare also pays
the price by a notable loss in taste, in sustained inspiration,
in consecration, and in rationality. There is more or less
rubbish in his greatest works. When we come down to
our own day we find poets of hardly less natural endow
ment (for in endowment all ages are perhaps alike) and
with vastly richer sources of inspiration ; for they have
many arts and literatures behind them, with the spectacle
of a varied and agitated society, a world which is the living
microcosm of its own history and presents in one picture
many races, arts, and religions. Our poets have more
wonderful tragedies of the imagination to depict than had
Homer, whose world was innocent of any essential defeat,
or Dante, who believed in the world s definitive redemption.
Or, if perhaps their inspiration is comic, they have the
pageant of mediaeval manners, with its picturesque artifices
and passionate fancies, and the long comedy of modern
social revolutions, so illusory in their aims and so produc
tive in their aimlessness. They have, moreover, the new
and marvellous conception which natural science has given
us of the world and of the conditions of human progress.

With all these lessons of experience behind them,
however, we find our contemporary poets incapable of
any high wisdom, incapable of any imaginative rendering
of human life and its meaning. Our poets are things of
shreds and patches ; they give us episodes and studies,
a sketch of this curiosity, a glimpse of that romance ; they
have no total vision, no grasp of the whole reality, and
consequently no capacity for a sane and steady idealization.
This age of material elaboration has no sense for perfection.
Its fancy is retrospective, whimsical, and flickering ; its
ideals, when it has any, are negative and partial ; its moral
strength is a blind and miscellaneous vehemence. Its
poetry, in a word, is the poetry of barbarism.

This poetry should be viewed in relation to the general
moral crisis and imaginative disintegration of which it
gives a verbal echo ; then we shall avoid the injustice of
passing it over as insignificant, no less than the imbecility
of hailing it as essentially glorious and successful. We
must remember that the imagination of our race has been
subject to a double discipline. It has been formed partly

184 LITTLE ESSAYS

in the school of classic literature and polity, and partly
in the school of Christian piety. This duality of inspira
tion, this contradiction between the two accepted methods
of rationalizing the world, has been a chief source of that
incoherence, that romantic indistinctness and imperfection,
which largely characterize the products of the modern arts.
A man cannot serve two masters ; yet the conditions
have not been such as to allow him wholly to despise the
one or wholly to obey the other. To be wholly pagan
is impossible after the dissolution of that civilization which
had seemed universal, and that empire which had believed
itself eternal. To be wholly Christian is impossible for
a similar reason, now that the illusion and cohesion of
Christian ages is lost, and for the further reason that
Christianity was itself fundamentally eclectic. Before it
could succeed and dominate men even for a time, it was
obliged to adjust itself to reality, to incorporate many
elements of pagan wisdom, and to accommodate itself to
many habits and passions at variance with its own ideal.

In these latter times, with the prodigious growth of
material life in elaboration and of mental life in diffusion,
there has supervened upon this old dualism a new faith
in man s absolute power, a kind of return to the inexperi
ence and self-assurance of youth. This new inspiration
has made many minds indifferent to the two traditional
disciplines ; neither is seriously accepted by them, for
the reason, excellent from their own point of view, that
no discipline whatever is needed. The memory of ancient
disillusions has faded with time. Ignorance of the past
has bred contempt for the lessons which the past might
teach. Men prefer to repeat the old experiment without
knowing that they repeat it.

73
THE UNHAPPINESS OF ARTISTS

So long as happiness is conceived as a poet might
conceive it, namely, in its immediately sensuous and
emotional factors, so long as we live in the moment and

THE UNHAPPINESS OF ARTISTS 185

make our happiness consist in the simplest things, in
breathing, seeing, hearing, loving, and sleeping, our
happiness has the same substance, the same elements, as our
aesthetic delight, for it is aesthetic delight that makes our
happiness. Yet poets and artists, with their immediate
and aesthetic joys, are not thought to be happy men ;
they themselves are apt to be loud in their lamentations,
and to regard themselves as eminently and tragically
unhappy. This arises from the intensity and inconstancy
of their emotions, from their improvidence, and from the
eccentricity of their social habits. While among them the
sensuous and vital functions have the upper hand, the
gregarious and social instincts are subordinated and often
deranged ; and their unhappiness consists in the sense of
their unfitness to live in the world into which they are
born.

But man is pre-eminently a political animal, and social
needs are almost as fundamental in him as vital functions,
and often more conscious. Friendship, wealth, reputation,
power, and influence, when added to family life, constitute
surely the main elements of happiness. Now these are
only very partially composed of definite images. The
desire for them, the consciousness of their absence or
possession, comes upon us only when we reflect, when we
are planning, considering the future, gathering the words
of others, rehearsing their scorn or admiration for ourselves,
conceiving possible situations in which our virtue, our
fame or power would become conspicuous, comparing our
lot with that of others, and going through other discursive
processes of thought. If artists and poets are unhappy,
it is after all because happiness does not interest them.
They cannot seriously pursue it, because its components
are not components of beauty, and being in love with beauty,
they neglect and despise those unaesthetic social virtues
in the operation of which happiness is found. On the
other hand those who pursue happiness conceived merely
in abstract and conventional terms, as money, success, or
respectability, often miss that real and fundamental
part of happiness which flows from the senses and imagina
tion. This element is what the love of beauty can add
to life ; for beauty can also be a cause and a factor of

i86 LITTLE ESSAYS

happiness. Yet the happiness of loving beauty is either
too sensuous to be stable, or else too ultimate, too sacra
mental, to be accounted happiness by the worldly mind.

74
POETRY OF LATIN PEOPLES

EVERY Italian of culture in the days of the Renaissance
was in the habit of addressing little pieces to his friends,
and of casting his thoughts or his prayers into the mould
of a sonnet or a madrigal. Verse has a greater naturalness
and a wider range among the Latin peoples than among
the English ; poetry and prose are less differentiated.
In French, Italian, and Spanish, as in Latin itself, elegance
and neatness of expression suffice for verse. The reader
passes without any sense of incongruity or anti-climax
from passion to reflection, from sentiment to satire, from
flights of fancy to homely details : the whole has a certain
human sincerity and intelligibility which weld it together.
As the Latin languages are not composed of two diverse
elements, as English is of Latin and German, so the Latin
mind does not have two spheres of sentiment, one vulgar
and the other sublime. All changes are variations on a
single key, which is the key of intelligence. We must not
be surprised, therefore, to find now a message to a friend,
now an artistic maxim, now a bit of dialectic, and now a
confession of sin, taking the form of verse and filling out
the fourteen lines of a sonnet. On the contrary, we must
look to these familiar compositions for the most genuine
evidence of a man s daily thoughts.

75
DANTE

DANTE, gifted with the tenderest sense of colour, and the
firmest art of design, has put his whole world into his
canvas. Seen there, that world becomes complete, clear,

DANTE 187

beautiful, and tragic. It is vivid and truthful in its detail,
sublime in its march and in its harmony. This is not
poetry where the parts are better than the whole. Here,
as in some great symphony, everything is cumulative :
the movements conspire, the tension grows, the volume
redoubles, the keen melody soars higher and higher ;
and it all ends, not with a bang, not with some casual
incident, but in sustained reflection, in the sense that it
has not ended, but remains by us in its totality, a revela
tion and a resource for ever. It has taught us to love and
to renounce, to judge and to worship. What more could
a poet do ? Dante poetized all life and nature as he found
them His imagination dominated and focussed the whole
world. He thereby touched the ultimate goal to which
a poet can aspire ; he set the standard for all possible
performance, and became the type of a supreme poet.
This is not to say that he is the " greatest " of poets. The
relative merit of poets is a barren thing to wrangle about.
The question can always be opened anew, when a critic
appears with a fresh temperament or a new criterion.
Even less need we say that no greater poet can ever arise ;
we may be confident of the opposite. But Dante gives a
successful example of the highest species of poetry. His
poetry covers the whole field from which poetry may be
fetched, and to which poetry may be applied, from the
inmost recesses of the heart to the uttermost bounds of
nature and of destiny., If to give imaginative value to
something is the minimum task of a poet, to give imagina
tive value to all things, and to the system which things
compose, is evidently his greatest task.

Dante fulfilled this task, of course under special con
ditions and limitations, personal and social ; but he
fulfilled it, and he thereby fulfilled the conditions of
supreme poetry., Even Homer, as we are beginning to
perceive nowadays, suffered from a certain conventionality
and one-sidedness. There was much in the life and religion
of his time that his art ignored. It was a flattering, a
euphemistic art ; it had a sort of pervasive blandness,
like that which we now associate with a fashionable sermon.
It was poetry addressed to the ruling caste in the state, to
the conquerors ; and it spread an intentional glamour over

188 LITTLE ESSAYS

their past brutalities and present self-deceptions. No
such partiality in Dante ; he paints what he hates as
frankly as what he loves, and in all things he is complete
and sincere. Yet if any similar adequacy is attained again
by any poet, it will not be, presumably, by a poet of the
supernatural. Henceforth, for any wide and honest
imagination, the supernatural must figure as an idea in
the human mind, a part of the natural. To conceive
it otherwise would be to fall short of the insight of this age,
not to express or to complete it. Dante, however, for this
very reason, may be expected to remain the supreme poet
of the supernatural, the unrivalled exponent, after Plato,
of that phase of thought and feeling in which the super
natural seems to be the key to nature and to happiness.
This is the hypothesis on which, as yet, moral unity has
been best attained in this world. Here, then, we have the
most complete idealization and comprehension of things
achieved by mankind hitherto. Dante is the type of a
consummate poet.

76
ABSENCE OF RELIGION IN SHAKESPEARE

SHAKESPEARE could be idealistic when he dreamed, as he
could be spiritual when he reflected. The spectacle of life
did not pass before his eyes as a mere phantasmagoria.
He seized upon its principles ; he became wise. Nothing
can exceed the ripeness of his seasoned judgment, or the
occasional breadth, sadness, and terseness of his reflection.
The author of Hamlet could not be without metaphysical
aptitude ; Macbeth could not have been written without
a sort of sibylline inspiration, or the Sonnets without
something of the Platonic mind. It is all the more
remarkable, therefore, that we should have to search
through all the works of Shakespeare to find half-a-dozen
passages that have so much as a religious sound, and that
even these passages, upon examination, should prove not
to be the expression of any deep religious conception.
If Shakespeare had been without metaphysical capacity,

ABSENCE OF RELIGION IN SHAKESPEARE 189

or without moral maturity, we could have explained his
strange insensibility to religion ; but as it is, we must
marvel at his indifference and ask ourselves what can be
the causes of it. For, even if we should not regard the
absence of religion as an imperfection in his own thought,
we must admit it to be an incompleteness in his portrayal
of the thought of others. Positivism may be a virtue in
a philosopher, but it is a vice in a dramatist, who has
to render those human passions to which the religious
imagination has always given a larger meaning and a
greater depth.

Those poets by whose side we are accustomed to put
Shakespeare did not forgo this advantage. They gave us
man with his piety and the world with its gods. Homer
is the chief repository of the Greek religion, and Dante the
faithful interpreter of the Catholic. Nature would have
been inconceivable to them without the supernatural,
or man without the influence and companionship of the
gods. These poets live in a cosmos. In their minds, as
in the mind of their age, the fragments of experience have
fallen together into a perfect picture, like the bits of glass
in a kaleidoscope. Their universe is a total. Reason and
imagination have mastered it completely and peopled it.
No chaos remains beyond, or, if it does, it is thought of
with an involuntary shudder that soon passes into a healthy
indifference. They have a theory of human life ; they
see man in his relations, surrounded by a kindred universe
in which he fills his allotted place. He knows the meaning
and issue of his life, and does not voyage without a
chart.

Shakespeare s world, on the contrary, is only the world
of human society. The cosmos eludes him ; he does not
seem to feel the need of framing that idea. He depicts
human life in all its richness and variety, but leaves that
life without a setting, and consequently without a meaning.
If we asked him to tell us what is the significance of the
passion and beauty he had so vividly displayed, and what
is the outcome of it all, he could hardly answer in any
other words than those he puts into the mouth of
Macbeth :

igo LITTLE ESSAYS

" To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time ;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle !
Life s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more : it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."

How differently would Homer or Dante have answered
that question ! Their tragedy would have been illumined
by a sense of the divinity of life and beauty, or by a sense
of the sanctity of suffering and death. Their faith had
enveloped the world of experience in a world of imagination,
in which the ideals of the reason, of the fancy, and of the
heart had a natural expression. They had caught in the
reality the hint of a lovelier fable, a fable in which that
reality was completed and idealized, and made at once
vaster in its extent and more intelligible in its principle.
They had, as it were, dramatized the universe, and endowed
it with the tragic unities. In contrast with such a luminous
philosophy and so well-digested an experience, the silence
of Shakespeare and his philosophical incoherence have
something in them that is still heathen ; something that
makes us wonder whether the northern mind, even in him,
did not remain morose and barbarous at its inmost core.

77
ROMANTIC IGNORANCE OF SELF

NOTHING is further from the common people than the
corrupt desire to be primitive. They instinctively look
toward a more exalted life, which they imagine to be full
of distinction and pleasure, and the idea of that brighter
existence fills them with hope or with envy or with humble
admiration. But a barbarous ideal requires tasks and
dangers incompatible with happiness ; a rude and oppressed
conscience is incapable of regarding as good a state which
excludes its own acrid satisfactions.

The purpose of education is to free us from these

ROMANTIC IGNORANCE OF SELF 191

prejudices. For the barbarian is the man who regards his
passions as their own excuse for being ; who does not
domesticate them either by understanding their cause or
by conceiving their ideal goal. He is the man who does
not know his derivations nor perceive his tendencies, but
who merely feels and acts, valuing in his life its force and
its filling, but being careless of its purpose and its form.
His delight is in abundance and vehemence ; his art, like his
life, shows an exclusive respect for quantity and splendour
of materials. His scorn for what is poorer and weaker than
himself is only surpassed by his ignorance of what is higher.
To frame solid ideals, which would, in fact, be better
than actual things, is not granted to the merely irritable
poet ; it is granted only to the master- workman, to the
modeller of some given substance to some given use
things which define his aspiration, and separate what is
relevant and glorious in his dreams from that large part
of them which is merely ignorant and peevish. In
romantic drama, accidents make the meaningless happiness
or unhappiness of a supersensitive adventurer. Chivalry
is a fine emblazoning of the original manly impulse to fight
every man and love every woman. Something drives the
youth afield, into solitude, into alien friendships ; only in
the face of nature and an indifferent world can he become
himself. Such a flight from home and all its pieties grows
more urgent when there is some real conflict of temper or
conscience between the young man and what is established
in his family ; and this happens often because, after all,
the most beneficent conventions are but mechanisms
which must ignore the nicer sensibilities and divergences
of living souls. Common men accept these spiritual
tyrannies, weak men repine at them, and great men break
them down.

78
THE BARBARIAN

THE picture of life as an eternal war for illusory ends
was drawn at first by satirists, unhappily with too
much justification in the facts. Some grosser minds, too

IQ2 LITTLE ESSAYS

undisciplined to have ever pursued a good either truly
attainable or truly satisfactory, then proceeded to mistake
that satire on human folly for a sober account of the whole
universe ; and finally others were not ashamed to represent
it as the ideal itself so soon is the dyer s hand subdued
to what it works in. A barbarous mind cannot conceive
life, like health, as a harmony continually preserved or
restored, and containing those natural and ideal activities
which disease merely interrupts. Such a mind, never
having tasted order, cannot conceive it, and identifies
progress with new conflicts and life with continual death.
Its deification of unreason, instability, and strife comes
partly from piety and partly from inexperience. There is
piety in saluting nature in her perpetual flux and in thinking
that since no equilibrium is maintained for ever none,
perhaps, deserves to be. There is inexperience in not
considering that wherever interests and judgments exist,
the natural flux has fallen, so to speak, into a vortex, and
created a natural good, a cumulative life, and an ideal
purpose. Art, science, government, human nature itself,
are self-defining and self-preserving : by partly fixing a
structure they fix an ideal. But the barbarian can hardly
regard such things, for to have distinguished and fostered
them would be to have founded a civilization.

To confuse means with ends and mistake disorder for
vitality is not unnatural to minds that hear the hum of
mighty workings but can imagine neither the cause nor
the fruits of that portentous commotion. All functions,
in such chaotic lives, seem instrumental functions. It is
then supposed that what serves no further purpose can
have no value, and that he who suffers no effuscation can
have no feeling and no life. To attain an ideal seems to
destroy its worth. Moral life, at that low level, is a
fantastic game only, not having come in sight of humane
and liberal interests. The barbarian s intensity is without
seriousness and his passion without joy. His philosophy,
which means to glorify all experience and to digest all vice,
is in truth an expression of pathetic innocence. It betrays
a rudimentary impulse to follow every beckoning hand, to
assume that no adventure and no bewitchment can be any
thing but glorious. Such an attitude is intelligible in one

THE BARBARIAN 193

who has never seen anything worth seeing nor loved anything
worth loving. Immaturity could go no further than to
acknowledge no limits denning will and happiness. When
such limits, however, are gradually discovered and an
authoritative ideal is born of the marriage of human nature
with experience, happiness becomes at once definite and
attainable ; for adjustment is possible to a world that has
a fruitful and intelligible structure.

Such incoherences, which might well arise in ages without
traditions, may be preserved and fostered by superstition.
Perpetual servile employments and subjection to an
irrational society may render people incapable even of
conceiving a liberal life. They may come to think their
happiness no longer separable from their misery and to fear
the large emptiness, as they deem it, of a happy world.
Like the prisoner of Chillon, after so long a captivity, they
would regain their freedom with a sigh. The wholesome
influences of nature, however, would soon revive their
wills, contorted by unnatural oppression, and a vision of
perfection would arise within them upon breathing a purer
air. Freedom and perfection are synonymous with life.
The peace they bring is one

whose names are also rapture, power,
Clear sight, and love ; for these are parts of peace.

79
ROMANTICISM

THE romantic poet is a novelist in verse. He is a philo
sopher of experience as it comes to the individual ; the
philosopher of life, as action, memory, or soliloquy may
put life before each of us in turn. Now the zest of
romanticism consists in taking what you know is an inde
pendent and ancient world as if it were material for your
private emotions. The savage or the animal, who should
not be aware of nature or history at all, could not be
romantic about them, nor about himself. He would be
blandly idiotic, and take everything quite unsuspectingly

o

194 LITTLE ESSAYS

for what it was in him. The romanticist, then, should be
a civilized man, so that his primitiveness and egotism may
have something paradoxical and conscious about them ;
and so that his life may contain a rich experience, and his
reflection may play with all varieties of sentiment and
thought. At the same time, in his inmost genius, he should
be a barbarian, a child, a transcendentalist, so that his life
may seem to him absolutely fresh, self-determined, un
foreseen, and unforeseeable. It is part of his inspiration
to believe that he creates a new heaven and a new earth
with each revolution in his moods or in his purposes. He
ignores, or seeks to ignore, all the conditions of life, until
perhaps by living he personally discovers them. Like
Faust, he flouts science, and is minded to make trial of
magic, which renders a man s will master of the universe
in which he seems to live. He disowns all authority, save
that mysteriously exercised over him by his deep faith
in himself. He is always honest and brave ; but he is
always different, and absolves himself from his past as
soon as he has outgrown or forgotten it. He is inclined to
be wayward and foolhardy, justifying himself on the ground
that all experience is interesting, that the springs of it are
inexhaustible and always pure, and that the future of his
soul is infinite. In the romantic hero the civilized man
and the barbarian must be combined ; he should be the
heir to all civilization, and, nevertheless, he should take
life arrogantly and egotistically, as if it were an absolute
personal experiment.

The great merit of the romantic attitude in poetry, and
of the transcendental method in philosophy, is that they
put us back at the beginning of our experience. They
disintegrate convention, which is often cumbrous and
confused, and restore us to ourselves, to immediate per
ception and primordial will. That, as it would seem, is
the true and inevitable starting-point. Had we not been
born, had we not peeped into this world, each out of his
personal eggshell, this world might indeed have existed
without us, as a thousand undiscoverable worlds may now
exist ; but for us it would not have existed. This obvious
truth would not need to be insisted on but for two reasons :
one that conventional knowledge, such as our notions of

ROMANTICISM 195

science and morality afford, is often top-heavy ; it asserts
and imposes on us much more than our experience warrants,
our experience, which is our only approach to reality.
The other reason is the reverse or counterpart of this ; for
conventional knowledge often ignores and seems to suppress
parts of experience no less actual and important for us
than those parts on which the conventional knowledge itself
is reared. The public world is too narrow for the soul,
as well as too mythical and fabulous. Hence the double
critical labour and reawakening which romantic reflection
is good for, to cut off the dead branches and feed the
starving shoots. This philosophy, as Kant said, is a
cathartic : it is purgative and liberating ; it is intended to
make us start afresh and start right.

It follows that one who has no sympathy with such a
philosophy is a comparatively conventional person. He
has a second-hand mind. It follows, also, however, that
one who has no philosophy but this has no wisdom ; he
can say nothing that is worth carrying away ; everything
in him is attitude and nothing is achievement. Words of
wisdom diversify this career of folly, as exquisite scenes
fill this tortuous and overloaded drama. The mind has
become free and sincere, but it has remained bewildered.

The literary merits of romanticism correspond accurately
with its philosophical excellences. In the prologue to
Faust, Goethe has described them ; much scenery, much
wisdom, some folly, great wealth of incident and character
ization ; and behind, the soul of a poet singing with all
sincerity and fervour the visions of his life. Here is
profundity, inwardness, honesty, waywardness ; here are
the most touching accents of nature, and the most varied
assortment of curious lore and grotesque fancies. This
work, says Goethe, is like human life : it has a beginning,
it has an end ; but it has no totality, it is not one whole.
How, indeed, should we draw the sum of an infinite
experience that is without conditions to determine it, and
without goals in which it terminates ? Evidently all a poet
of pure experience can do is to represent some snatches of
it, more or less prolonged ; and the more prolonged the
experience represented is the more it will be a collection of
snatches, and the less the last part of it will have to do with

196 LITTLE ESSAYS

the beginning. Any character which we may attribute to
the whole of what we have surveyed would fail to dominate
it, if that whole had been larger, and if we had had memory
or foresight enough to include other parts of experience
differing altogether in kind from the episodes we happen
to have lived through. To be miscellaneous, to be in
definite, to be unfinished, is essential to the romantic life.
May we not say that it is essential to all life, in its im
mediacy ; and that only in reference to what is not life
to objects, ideals, and unanimities that cannot be ex
perienced but may only be conceived can life become
rational and truly progressive ? Herein we may see the
radical and inalienable excellence of romanticism ; its
sincerity, freedom, richness, and infinity. Herein, too,
we may see its limitations, in that it cannot fix or trust any
of its ideals, and blindly believes the universe to be as
wayward as itself, so that nature and art are always
slipping through its fingers. It is obstinately empirical,
and will never learn anything from experience.

80
THE POLITICS OF FAUST

WE should expect Faust, who had lain in the lap of absolute
beauty, to understand its nature. We should expect him,
in eager search after perfection, to establish his state on
the distinction between the better and the worse, a
distinction never to be abolished or obscured for one who
has loved beauty. In other words, he might have estab
lished a moral society, founding it on great renunciations
and on enlightened heroisms, so that the highest beauty
might really come down and dwell within that city. But
we find nothing of the sort. Faust founds his kingdom
because he must do something ; and his only ideal of what
he hopes to secure for his subjects is that they shall always
have something to do. Thus the will to live, in Faust, is
not in the least educated by his experience. It changes
its objects because it must ; the passions of youth yield to
those of age ; and among all the illusions of his life the
most fatuous is the illusion of progress.

THE POLITICS OF FAUST 197

It is characteristic of the absolute romantic spirit
that when it has finished with something it must invent a
new interest. It beats the bush for fresh game ; it is
always on the verge of being utterly bored. So now that
Helen is flown, Mephistopheles must come to the rescue,
like an amiable nurse, and propose all sorts of pastimes.
Frankfort, Leipzig, Paris, Versailles, are described, with
the entertainments that life there might afford ; but Faust,
who was always difficile, has been rendered more so by
his recent splendid adventures. However, a new impulse
suddenly arises in his breast. From the mountain-top to
which Helen s mantle has borne him, he can see the German
Ocean, with its tides daily covering great stretches of the
flat shore, and rendering them brackish and uninhabitable.
It would be a fine thing to reclaim those wastes, to plant
there a prosperous population. After Greece, Faust has a
vision of Holland.

This last ambition of Faust s is as romantic as the others.
He feels the prompting towards political art, as he had felt
the prompting towards love or beauty. The notion of
transforming things by his will, of leaving for ages his
mark upon nature and upon human society, fascinates
him ; but this passion for activity and power, which some
simple-minded commentators dignify with the name of
altruism and of living for others, has no steady purpose
or standard about it. Goethe is especially lavish in details
to prove this point. Magic, the exercise of an unteachable
will, is still Faust s instrument. Mephistopheles, by various
arts of illusion, secures the triumph of the emperor in
a desperate war which he is carrying on against a justifi
able insurrection. As a reward for the aid rendered,
Faust receives the shore marches in fief. The necessary
dykes and canals are built by magic ; the spirits that
Mephistopheles commands dig and build them with
strange incantations. The commerce that springs up is
also illegitimate : piracy is involved in it.

Nor is this all. On some sand-dunes that diversified
the original beach, an old man and his wife, Philemon and
Baucis, lived before the advent of Faust and his improve
ments. On the hillock, besides their cottage, there stood
a small chapel, with a bell which disturbed Faust in his

igS LITTLE ESSAYS

newly built palace, partly by its importunate sound,
partly by its Christian suggestions, and partly by reminding
him that he was not master of the country altogether,
and that something existed in it not the product of his
magical will. The old people would not sell out ; and in
a fit of impatience Faust orders that they should be evicted
by force, and transferred to a better dwelling elsewhere.
Mephistopheles and his minions execute these orders
somewhat roughly : the cottage and chapel are set on fire,
and Philemon and Baucis are consumed in the flames, or
buried in the ruins.

Faust regrets this accident ; but it is one of those
inevitable developments of action which a brave man
must face, and forget as soon as possible. He had regretted
in the same way the unhappiness of Gretchen, and, pre
sumably, the death of Euphorion ; but such is romantic
life. His will, though shaken, is not extinguished by such
misadventures. He would continue, if life could last,
doing things that, in some respect, he would be obliged
to regret : but he would banish that regret easily, in the
pursuit of some new interest, and, on the whole, he would
not regret having been obliged to regret them. Otherwise,
he would not have shared the whole experience of mankind,
but missed the important experience of self-accusation and
of self-recovery.

It is impossible to suppose that the citizens he is establish
ing behind leaky dykes, so that they may always have
something to keep them busy, would have given him
unmixed satisfaction if he could really have foreseen their
career in its concrete details. Holland is an interesting
country, but hardly a spectacle which would long entrance
an idealist like Faust, so exacting that he has found the
arts and sciences wholly vain, domesticity impossible, and
kitchens and beer-cellars beneath consideration. The
career of Faust himself had been far more free and active
than that of his industrious burghers could ever hope to be.
His interest in establishing them is a masterful, irresponsible
interest. It is one more arbitrary passion, one more
selfish illusion. As he had no conscience in his love, and
sought and secured nobody s happiness, so he has no
conscience in his ambition and in his political architecture ;

THE POLITICS OF FAUST 199

but if only his will is done, he does not ask whether, judged
by its fruits, it will be worth doing. As his immense
dejection at the beginning, when he was a doctor in
his laboratory, was not founded on any real misfortune,
but on restlessness and a vague infinite ambition, so his
ultimate satisfaction in his work is not founded on any
good done, but on a passionate wilfulness. He calls the
things he wants for others good, because he now wants to
bestow it on them, not because they naturally want it for
themselves. Incapable of sympathy, he has a momentary
pleasure in policy ; and in the last and " highest " ex
pression of his will, in his statesmanship and supposed public
spirit, he remains romantic and, if need be, aggressive and
criminal.

81
EMERSON

IF we ask ourselves what was Emerson s relation to the
scientific and religious movements of his time, and what
place he may claim in the history of opinion, we must
answer that he belonged very little to the past, very little
to the present, and almost wholly to that abstract sphere
into which mystical or philosophic aspiration has carried a
few men in all ages. The religious tradition in which he
was reared was that of Puritanism, but of a Puritanism
which, retaining its moral intensity and metaphysical
abstraction, had minimized its doctrinal expression and
become Unitarian. Emerson was indeed the Psyche of
Puritanism, " the latest-born and fairest vision far " of
all that " faded hierarchy." A Puritan whose religion
was all poetry, a poet whose only pleasure was thought,
he showed in his life and personality the meagreness, the
constraint, the frigid and conscious consecration which
belonged to his clerical ancestors, while his inmost im
personal spirit ranged abroad over the fields of history
and nature, gathering what ideas it might, and singing its
little snatches of inspired song.

The traditional element was thus rather an external and
inessential contribution to Emerson s mind ; he had the

200 LITTLE ESSAYS

professional tinge, the decorum, the distinction of an old-
fashioned divine ; he had also the habit of writing sermons,
and he had the national pride and hope of a religious people
that felt itself providentially chosen to establish a free
and godly commonwealth in a new world. For the rest,
he separated himself from the ancient creed of the com
munity with a sense rather of relief than of regret. A
literal belief in Christian doctrines repelled him as un-
spiritual, as manifesting no understanding of the meaning
which, as allegories, those doctrines might have to a
philosophic and poetical spirit. Although, being a clergy
man, he was at first in the habit of referring to the Bible
and its lessons as to a supreme authority, he had no
instinctive sympathy with the inspiration of either the
Old or the New Testament ; in Hafiz or Plutarch, in Plato
or Shakespeare, he found more congenial stuff.

While he thus preferred to withdraw, without rancour
and without contempt, from the ancient fellowship of the
church, he assumed an attitude hardly less cool and
deprecatory toward the enthusiasms of the new era.
The national ideal of democracy and freedom had his entire
sympathy ; he allowed himself to be drawn into the
movement against slavery ; he took a curious and smiling
interest in the discoveries of natural science and in the
material progress of the age. But he could go no further.
His contemplative nature, his religious training, his
dispersed reading, made him stand aside from the life of
the world, even while he studied it with benevolent atten
tion. His heart was fixed on eternal things, and he was
in no sense a prophet for his age or country. He belonged
by nature to that mystical company of devout souls that
recognize no particular home and are dispersed throughout
history, although not without intercommunication. He
felt his affinity to the Hindoos and the Persians, to the
Platonists and the Stoics. Yet he was a shrewd Yankee,
by instinct on the winning side ; he was a cheery, child-like
soul, impervious to the evidence of evil, as of everything
that it did not suit his transcendental individuality to
appreciate or to notice. More, perhaps, than anybody
that has ever lived, he practised the transcendental method
in all its purity. He had no system. He opened his eyes

EMERSON 201

on the world every morning with a fresh sincerity, marking
how things seemed to him then, or what they suggested to
his spontaneous fancy. This fancy, for being spontaneous,
was not always novel ; it was guided by the habits and
training of his mind, which were those of a preacher.
Yet he never insisted on his notions so as to turn them into
settled dogmas ; he felt in his bones that they were myths.
Sometimes, indeed, the bad example of other transcenden-
talists, less true than he to their method, or the pressing
questions of unintelligent people, or the instinct we all
have to think our ideas final, led him to the very verge
of system-making ; but he stopped short. Had he made
a system out of his notion of compensation, or the over-soul,
or spiritual laws, the result would have been as thin and
forced as it is in other transcendental systems. But he
coveted truth ; and he returned to experience, to history,
to poetry, to the natural science of his day, for new starting-
points and hints toward fresh transcendental musings.

To covet truth is a very distinguished passion. Every
philosopher says he is pursuing the truth, but this is seldom
the case. As a philosopher has observed, one reason why
philosophers often fail to reach the truth is that often they
do not desire to reach it. Those who are genuinely con
cerned in discovering what happens to be true are rather
the men of science, the naturalists, the historians ; and
ordinarily they discover it, according to their lights. The
truths they find are never complete, and are not always
important ; but they are integral parts of the truth, facts
and circumstances that help to fill in the picture, and that
no later interpretation can invalidate or afford to con
tradict. But professional philosophers are usually only
apologists : that is, they are absorbed in defending some
vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or
detectives, they study the case for which they are retained,
to see how much evidence or semblance of evidence they
can gather for the defence, and how much prejudice they
can raise against the witnesses for the prosecution ; for
they know they are defending prisoners suspected by the
world, and perhaps by their own good sense, of falsification.
They do not covet truth, but victory and the dispelling of
their own doubts. What they defend is some system,

202 LITTLE ESSAYS

that is, some view about the totality of things, of which
men are actually ignorant. No system would have ever
been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing
what is true, whatever it may be. What produces systems
is the interest in maintaining against all comers that some
favourite or inherited idea of ours is sufficient and right.
A system may contain an account of many things which,
in detail, are true enough ; but as a system, covering
infinite possibilities that neither our experience nor our
logic can prejudge, it must be a work of imagination and
a piece of human soliloquy. It may be expressive of
human experience, it may be poetical ; but how should
any one who really coveted truth suppose that it was
true ?

Emerson had no system ; and his coveting truth had
another exceptional consequence ; he was detached,
unworldly, contemplative. When he came out of the
conventicle or the reform meeting, or out of the rapturous
close atmosphere of the lecture-room, he heard nature
whispering to him : " Why so hot, little sir ? " No doubt
the spirit or energy of the world is what is acting in us,
as the sea is what rises in every little wave ; but it passes
through us, and cry out as we may, it will move on. Our
privilege is to have perceived it as it moves. Our dignity
is not in what we do, but in what we understand. The
whole world is doing things. We are turning in that
vortex ; yet within us is silent observation, the specu
lative eye before which all passes, which bridges the
distances and compares the combatants. On this side
of his genius Emerson broke away from all conditions of
age or country and represented nothing except intelligence
itself.

There was another element in Emerson, curiously
combined with transcendentalism, namely, his love and
respect for nature. Nature, for the transcendentalist,
is precious because it is his own work, a mirror in which
he looks at himself and says (like a poet relishing his own
verses), " What a genius I am ! Who would have thought
there was such stuff in me ? " And the philosophical
egotist finds in his doctrine a ready explanation of what
ever beauty and commodity nature actually has. No

EMERSON 203

wonder, he says to himself, that nature is sympathetic,
since I made it. And such a view, one-sided and even
fatuous as it may be, undoubtedly sharpens the vision of
a poet and a moralist to all that is inspiriting and symbolic
in the natural world. Emerson was particularly ingenious
and clear-sighted in feeling the spiritual uses of fellowship
with the elements. This is something in which all Teutonic
poetry is rich and which forms, I think, the most genuine
and spontaneous part of modern taste, and especially of
American taste. Just as some people are naturally
enthralled and refreshed by music, so others are by
landscape. Music and landscape make up the spiritual
resources of those who cannot or dare not express their
unfulfilled ideals in words. Serious poetry, profound
religion (Calvinism, for instance), are the joys of an un-
happiness that confesses itself ; but when a genteel
tradition forbids people to confess that they are unhappy,
serious poetry and profound religion are closed to them by
that ; and since human life, in its depths, cannot then
express itself openly, imagination is driven for comfort
into abstract arts, where human circumstances are lost
sight of, and human problems dissolve in a purer medium.
The pressure of care is thus relieved, without its quietus
being found in intelligence. To understand oneself is the
classic form of consolation ; to elude oneself is the romantic.
In the presence of music or landscape human experience
eludes itself ; and thus romanticism is the bond between
transcendental and naturalistic sentiment. The winds
and clouds come to minister to the solitary ego.

82
SHELLEY

SHELLEY seems hardly to have been brought up ; he
grew up in the nursery among his young sisters, at school
among the rude boys, without any affectionate guidance,
without imbibing any religious or social tradition. If
he received any formal training or correction, he instantly
rejected it inwardly, set it down as unjust and absurd,

204 LITTLE ESSAYS

and turned instead to sailing paper boats, to reading
romances or to writing them, or to watching with delight
the magic of chemical experiments. Thus the mind of
Shelley was thoroughly disinherited ; but not, like the
minds of most revolutionists, by accident and through
the niggardliness of fortune, for few revolutionists would
be such if they were heirs to a baronetcy. Shelley s mind
disinherited itself out of allegiance to itself, because it
was too sensitive and too highly endowed for the world
into which it had descended. It rejected ordinary educa
tion, because it was incapable of assimilating it. Educa
tion is suitable to those few animals whose faculties are
not completely innate, animals that, like most men, may
be perfected by experience because they are born with
various imperfect alternative instincts rooted equally in
their system. But most animals, and a few men, are not
of this sort. They cannot be educated, because they are
born complete. Full of predeterminate intuitions, they
are without intelligence, which is the power of seeing
things as they are. Endowed with a specific, unshakable
faith, they are impervious to experience : and as they
burst the womb they bring ready-made with them their
final and only possible system of philosophy.

Love of the ideal, passionate apprehension of what
ought to be, has for its necessary counterpart condemna
tion of the actual, wherever the actual does not conform to
that ideal. The spontaneous soul, the soul of the child,
is naturally revolutionary ; and when the revolution fails,
the soul of the youth becomes naturally pessimistic. All
moral life and moral judgment have this deeply romantic
character ; they venture to assert a private ideal in the
face of an intractable and omnipotent world. Some
moralists begin by feeling the attraction of untasted and
ideal perfection. These, like Plato, excel in elevation,
and they are apt to despise rather than to reform the
world. Other moralists begin by a revolt against the
actual, at some point where they find the actual par
ticularly galling. These excel in sincerity; their pur
blind conscience is urgent, and they are reformers in
intent and sometimes even in action. But the ideals
they frame are fragmentary and shallow, often mere

SHELLEY 205

provisional vague watchwords, like liberty, equality, and
fraternity ; they possess no positive visions or plans
for moral life as a whole, like Plato s Republic.

Shelley was one of these spokesmen of the a priori, one
of these nurslings of the womb, like a bee or a butterfly ;
a dogmatic, inspired, perfect, and incorrigible creature.
He was innocent and cruel, swift and wayward, illuminated
and blind. Being a finished child of nature, not a joint
product, like most of us, of nature, history, and society,
he abounded miraculously in his own clear sense, but was
obtuse to the droll, miscellaneous lessons of fortune.
The cannonade of hard, inexplicable facts that knocks
into most of us what little wisdom we have left Shelley
dazed and sore, perhaps, but uninstructed. When the
storm was over, he began chirping again his own natural
note. If the world continued to confine and beset him,
he hated the world, and gasped for freedom. Being
incapable of understanding reality, he revelled in creating
world after world in idea. For his nature was not merely
predetermined and obdurate, it was also sensitive, vehe
ment, and fertile. With the soul of a bird, he had the
senses of a man-child ; the instinct of the butterfly was
united in him with the instinct of the brooding fowl and
of the pelican. This winged spirit had a heart. It darted
swiftly on its appointed course, neither expecting nor
understanding opposition ; but when it met opposition
it did not merely flutter and collapse ; it was inwardly
outraged, it protested proudly against fate, it cried aloud
for liberty and justice.

The consequence was that Shelley, having a nature
preformed but at the same time tender, passionate, and
moral, was exposed to early and continual suffering.
When the world violated the ideal which lay so clear
before his eyes, that violation filled him with horror. If
to the irrepressible gushing of life from within we add
the suffering and horror that continually checked it,
we shall have in hand, I think, the chief elements of
his genius.

206 LITTLE ESSAYS

83
BROWNING

THE great dramatists have seldom dealt with perfectly
virtuous characters. The great poets have seldom repre
sented mythologies that would bear scientific criticism.
But by an instinct which constituted their greatness they
have cast these mixed materials furnished by life into
forms congenial to the specific principles of their art, and
by this transformation they have made acceptable in
the aesthetic sphere things that in the sphere of reality
were evil or imperfect : in a word, their works have been
beautiful as works of art. Or, if their genius exceeded
that of the technical poet and rose to prophetic intuition,
they have known how to create ideal characters, not
possessed, perhaps, of every virtue accidentally needed
in this world, but possessed of what is ideally better, of
internal greatness and perfection. .They have also known
how to select and reconstruct their mythology so as to
make it a true interpretation of moral life. When we
read the maxims of lago, Falstaff, or Hamlet, we are
delighted if the thought strikes us as true, but we are
not less delighted if it strikes us as false. These characters
are not presented to us in order to enlarge our capacities
of passion nor in order to justify themselves as processes
of redemption ; they are there, clothed in poetry and
imbedded in plot, to entertain us with their imaginable
feelings and their interesting errors. Shakespeare, without
being especially a philosopher, stands by virtue of his
superlative genius on the plane of universal reason, far
above the passionate experience which he overlooks and
on which he reflects ; and he raises us for the moment to
his own level, to send us back again, if not better endowed
for practical life, at least not unacquainted with speculation.
With Browning the case is essentially different. When
his heroes are blinded by passion and warped by circum
stance, as they almost always are, he does not describe
the fact from the vantage-ground of the intellect and
invite us to look at it from that point of view. On the

BROWNING 207

contrary, his art is all self-expression or satire. For the
most part his hero, like Whitman s, is himself ; not appear
ing, as in the case of the American bard, in puns naturalibus,
but masked in all sorts of historical and romantic finery.
Sometimes, however, the personage, like Guido in " The
Ring and the Book " or the " frustrate ghosts " of other
poems, is merely a Marsyas, shown flayed and quivering
to the greater glory of the poet s ideal Apollo. The im
pulsive utterances and the crudities of most of the speakers
are passionately adopted by the poet as his own. He
thus perverts what might have been a triumph of imagina
tion into a failure of reason.

This circumstance has much to do with the fact that
Browning, in spite of his extraordinary gift for expressing
emotion, has hardly produced works purely and uncon
ditionally delightful. They not only portray passion,
which is interesting, but they betray it, which is odious.
His art was still in the service of the will. He had not
attained, in studying the beauty of things, that detach
ment of the phenomenon, that love of the form for its own
sake, which is the secret of contemplative satisfaction.
Therefore, the lamentable accidents of his personality
and opinions, in themselves no worse than those of other
mortals, passed into his art. He did not seek to elude
them : he had no free speculative faculty to dominate
them by. Or, to put the same thing differently, he was
too much in earnest in his fictions, he threw himself too
unreservedly into his creations. His imagination, like the
imagination we have in dreams, was merely a vent for
personal preoccupations. His art was inspired by purposes
less simple and universal than the ends of imagination
itself. His play of mind consequently could not be free
or pure. The creative impulse could not reach its goal
or manifest in any notable degree its own ingenuous ideal.

Browning, who had not had the education traditional
in his own country, used to say that Italy had been his
university. But it was a school for which he was ill
prepared, and he did not sit under its best teachers. For
the superficial ferment, the worldly passions, and the
crimes of the Italian Renaissance he had a keen interest
and intelligence. But Italy has been always a civilized

208 LITTLE ESSAYS

country, and beneath the trappings and suits of civiliza
tion which at that particular time it flaunted so gaily, it
preserved a civilized heart to which Browning s insight
could never penetrate. There subsisted in the best minds
a trained imagination and a cogent ideal of virtue. Italy
had a religion, and that religion permeated all its life,
and was the background without which even its secular
art and secular passions would not be truly intelligible.
The most commanding and representative, the deepest and
most appealing of Italian natures are permeated with this
religious inspiration. A Saint Francis, a Dante, a Michael
Angelo, breathe hardly anything else. Yet for Browning these
men and what they represented may be said not to have
existed. He saw, he studied, and he painted a decapitated
Italy. His vision could not mount so high as her head.

One of the elements of that higher tradition which
Browning was not prepared to imbibe was the idealization
of love. The passion he represents is lava hot from the
crater, in no way moulded, smelted, or refined. He had
no thought of subjugating impulses into the harmony of
reason. He did not master life, but was mastered by it.
Accordingly the love he describes has no wings ; it issues
in nothing. His lovers " extinguish sight and speech,
each on each " ; sense, as he says elsewhere, drowning
soul. The man in the gondola may well boast that he can
die ; it is the only thing he can properly do. Death is the
only solution of a love that is tied to its individual object
and inseparable from the alloy of passion and illusion
within itself. Browning s hero, because he has loved
intensely, says that he has lived ; he would be right, if
the significance of life were to be measured by the inten
sity of the feeling it contained, and if intelligence were
not the highest form of vitality. But had that hero
known how to love better and had he had enough spirit
to dominate his love, he might perhaps have been able to
carry away the better part of it and to say that he could
not die ; for one half of himself and of his love would
have been dead already and the other half would have
been eternal, having fed

On death, that feeds on men ;
And death once dead, there s no more dying then.

BROWNING 209

The irrationality of the passions which Browning
glorifies, making them the crown of life, is so gross that
at times he cannot help perceiving it.

How perplexed
Grows belief ! Well, this cold clay clod

Was man s heart :
Crumble it, and what comes next ? Is it God ?

Yes, he will tell us. These passions and follies, however
desperate in themselves and however vain for the individual,
are excellent as parts of the dispensation of Providence :

Be hate that fruit or love that fruit,
It forwards the general deed of man,
And each of the many helps to recruit
The life of the race by a general plan,
Each living his own to boot.

If we doubt, then, the value of our own experience,
even perhaps of our experience of love, we may appeal
to the interdependence of goods and evils in the world to
assure ourselves that, in view of its consequences elsewhere,
this experience was great and important after all. We
need not stop to consider this supposed solution, which
bristles with contradictions ; it would not satisfy Browning
himself, if he did not back it up with something more to
his purpose, something nearer to warm and transitive
feeling. The compensation for our defeats, the answer
to our doubts, is not to be found merely in a proof of the
essential necessity and perfection of the universe ; that
would be cold comfort, especially to so uncontemplative
a mind. No : that answer and compensation are to come
very soon and very vividly to every private bosom. There
is another life, a series of other lives, for this to happen in.
Death will come, and

I shall thereupon
Take rest, ere I be gone
Once more on my adventure brave and new,
Fearless and unperplexed,
When I wage battle next,
What weapons to select, what armour to endue.

P

210 LITTLE ESSAYS

For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,

The black minute s at end,
And the element s rage, the fiend-voices that rave

Shall dwindle, shall blend.
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,

Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul ! I shall clasp thee again

And with God be the rest !

Into this conception of continued life Browning has
put all the items furnished by fancy or tradition which
at the moment satisfied his imagination new adventures,
reunion with friends, and even, after a severe strain and
for a short while, a little peace and quiet. The gist of
the matter is that we are to live indefinitely, that all our
faults can be turned to good, all our unfinished business
settled, and that therefore there is time for anything we
like in this world and for all we need in the other. It
is in spirit the direct opposite of the philosophic maxim
of regarding the end, of taking care to leave a finished
life and a perfect character behind us. It is the opposite,
also, of the religious memento mori, of the warning that
the time is short before we go to our account. According
to Browning, there is no account : we have an infinite
credit. With an unconscious and characteristic mixture
of heathen instinct with Christian doctrine, he thinks of
the other world as heaven, but of the life to be led there
as of the life of nature.

Aristotle observes that we do not think the business
of life worthy of the gods, to whom we can only attri
bute contemplation ; if Browning had had the idea of
perfecting and rationalizing this life rather than of con
tinuing it indefinitely, he would have followed Aristotle
and the church in this matter. But he had no idea of
anything eternal ; and so he gave, as he would probably
have said, a filling to the empty Christian immortality
by making every man busy in it about many things.
And to the irrational man, to the boy, it is no unpleasant
idea to have an infinite number of days to live through,
an infinite number of dinners to eat, with an infinity of
fresh fights and new love-affairs, and no end of last rides
together.

But it is a mere euphemism to call this perpetual

BROWNING 211

vagrancy a development of the soul. A development
means the unfolding of a definite nature, the gradual
manifestation of a known idea. A series of phases, like
the successive leaps of a waterfall, is no development.
And Browning has no idea of an intelligible good which
the phases of life might approach and with reference to
which they might constitute a progress. His notion is
simply that the game of life, the exhilaration of action,
is inexhaustible. You may set up your tenpins again
after you have bowled them over, and you may keep
up the sport for ever. The point is to bring them down
as often as possible with a master-stroke and a big bang.
That will tend to invigorate in you that self-confidence
which in this system passes for faith. But it is unmeaning
to call such an exercise heaven, or to talk of being " with
God " in such a life, in any sense in which we are not with
God already and under all circumstances. Our destiny
would rather be, as Browning himself expresses it in a
phrase which Attila or Alaric might have composed,
" bound dizzily to the wheel of change to slake the thirst
of God."

Such an optimism and such a doctrine of immortality
can give no justification to experience which it does not
already have in its detached parts. Indeed, those dogmas
are not the basis of Browning s attitude, not conditions
of his satisfaction in living, but rather overflowings of that
satisfaction. The present life is presumably a fair average
of the whole series of " adventures brave and new " which
fall to each man s share ; were it not found delightful in
itself, there would be no motive for imagining and asserting
that it is reproduced in infinitum. So too if we did not
think that the evil in experience is actually utilized and
visibly swallowed up in its good effects, we should hardly
venture to think that God could have regarded as a good
something which has evil for its condition and which is
for that reason profoundly sad and equivocal. But
Browning s philosophy of life and habit of imagination
do not require the support of any metaphysical theory.
His temperament is perfectly self-sufficient and primary ;
what doctrines he has are suggested by it and are too
loose to give it more than a hesitant expression ; they are

212 LITTLE ESSAYS

quite powerless to give it any justification which it might
lack on its face.

It is the temperament, then, that speaks ; we may
brush aside as unsubstantial, and even as distorting, the
web of arguments and theories which it has spun out of
itself. And what does the temperament say ? That
life is an adventure, not a discipline ; that the exercise
of energy is the absolute good, irrespective of motives or
of consequences. These are the maxims of a frank bar
barism ; nothing could express better the lust of life,
the dogged unwillingness to learn from experience, the
contempt for rationality, the carelessness about perfection,
the admiration for mere force, in which barbarism always
betrays itself. The vague religion which seeks to justify
this attitude is really only another outburst of the same
irrational impulse.

In Browning this religion takes the name of Christianity,
and identifies itself with one or two Christian ideas
arbitrarily selected ; but at heart it has far more affinity
to the worship of Thor or of Odin than to the religion of
the Cross. The zest of life becomes a cosmic emotion ;
we lump the whole together and cry, " Hurrah for the
Universe ! " A faith which is thus a pure matter of
lustiness and inebriation rises and falls, attracts or repels,
with the ebb and flow of the mood from which it springs.
It is invincible because unseizable ; it is as safe from
refutation as it is rebellious to embodiment. But it
cannot enlighten or correct the passions on which it feeds.
Like a servile priest, it flatters them in the name of Heaven.
It cloaks irrationality in sanctimony ; and its admiration
for every bluff folly, being thus justified by a theory,
becomes a positive fanaticism, eager to defend any way
ward impulse.

84
NIETZSCHE

NIETZSCHE was personally more philosophical than his
philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb
immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar

NIETZSCHE 213

and constitutional invalid. He did not crave in the least
either wealth or empire. What he loved was solitude,
nature, music, books. But his imagination, like his judg
ment, was captious ; it could not dwell on reality, but
reacted furiously against it. Accordingly, when he speaks
of the will to be powerful, power is merely an eloquent
word on his lips. It symbolizes the escape from medio
crity. What power would be when attained and exercised
remains entirely beyond his horizon. What meets us every
where is the sense of impotence and a passionate rebellion
against it.

That there is no God is proved by Nietzsche pragmatic
ally, on the ground that belief in the existence of God
would have made him uncomfortable. Not at all for the
reason that might first occur to us : to imagine himself
a lost soul has always been a point of pride with the
romantic genius. The reason was that if there had been
any gods he would have found it intolerable not to be a god
himself. Poor Nietzsche ! The laurels of the Almighty
would not let him sleep.

It is hard to know if we should be more deceived in
taking these sallies seriously or in not taking them so. On
the one hand it all seems the swagger of an immature, half-
playful mind, like a child that tells you he will cut your
head off. The dreamy impulse, in its inception, is sincere
enough, but there is no vestige of any understanding of
what it proposes, of its conditions, or of its results. On
the other hand these explosions are symptomatic ; there
stirs behind them unmistakably an elemental force. That
an attitude is foolish, incoherent, disastrous, proves nothing
against the depth of the instinct that inspires it. Who
could be more intensely unintelligent than Luther or
Rousseau ? Yet the world followed them, not to turn back.
The molecular forces of society, so to speak, had already
undermined the systems which these men denounced.
If the systems have survived it is only because the re
formers, in their intellectual helplessness, could supply
nothing to take their place. So Nietzsche, in his genial
imbecility, betrays the shifting of great subterranean
forces. What he said may be nothing, but the fact that
he said it is all-important. Out of such wild intuitions,

214 LITTLE ESSAYS

because the heart of the child was in them, the man of the
future may have to build his philosophy. We should
forgive Nietzsche his boyish blasphemies. He hated with
clearness, if he did not know what to love.

85
INTRINSIC VALUES

BOTH Christianity and romanticism accustomed people
to disregard the intrinsic value of things. Things ought
to be useful for salvation, or symbols of other greater but
unknown things : it was not to be expected that they
should be simply good in themselves. This life was to be
justified, if justified at all, only as servile work or tedious
business may be justified, not as health or artistic expres
sion justify themselves. Unless some external and ulterior
end could be achieved by living, it was thought that life
would be vanity. Remove now the expectation of a
millennium or of a paradise in the sky, and it may seem
that all serious value has disappeared from our earthly
existence. Yet this feeling is only a temporary after
image of a particular education.

The romantic poets, through pride, restlessness, and
longing for vague impossible things, came to the same
conclusion that the church had reached through censorious-
ness and hope. To be always dissatisfied seemed to that
Faust-like age a mark of loftiness. To be dissatisfied is,
indeed, a healthy and promising thing, when what troubles
us can be set right ; but the romantic mind despises such
incidental improvements which far from freeing the wild
egotistical soul would rather fatten and harness it. It is
beneath the romantic pessimist to remember that people,
in all ages, sometimes achieve what they have set their
hearts on, and that if human will and conduct were better
disciplined, this contentment would be more frequent and
more massive. On the contrary, he asserts that willing
is always and everywhere abortive.

How can he persuade himself of something so evidently
false ? By that mystical misinterpretation of human nature

INTRINSIC VALUES 215

which is perhaps the core of romanticism. He imagines
that what is desired is not this or that food, children,
victory, knowledge, or some other specific goal of a human
instinct but an abstract and perpetual happiness behind
all these alternating interests. Of course an abstract
and perpetual happiness is impossible, not merely because
events are sure to disturb any equilibrium we may think
we have established in our lives, but for the far more
fundamental reason that we have no abstract and per
petual instinct to satisfy. The desire for self-preservation
or power or union with God is no more perpetual or com
prehensive than any other : it is commonly when we are
in straits that we become aware of such objects, and to
achieve them, or imagine we achieve them, will give us
only a momentary satisfaction, like any other success.
A highest good to be obtained apart from each and every
specific interest is more than unattainable ; it is unthink
able. The romanticist, chasing wilfully that ignis fatuus,
naturally finds his life arduous and disappointing. But
he might have learned from Plato or any sound moralist,
if his genius could allow him to learn anything, that the
highest good of man is the sum and harmony of those
specific goods upon which his nature is directed. But
because the romantic will was unteachable, all will was
declared to be foolish.

86
HEATHENISM

SCHOPENHAUER somewhere observes that the word heathen,
no longer in reputable use elsewhere, had found a last
asylum in Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
Even Oxford, I believe, has now abandoned it ; yet it is a
good word. It conveys, as no other word can, the sense
of vast multitudes tossing in darkness, harassed by demons
of their own choice. No doubt it implies also a certain
sanctimony in the superior person who uses it, as if he
at least were not chattering in the general Babel. What
justified Jews, Christians, and Moslems (as Mohammed in
particular insisted) in feeling this superiority was the

216 LITTLE ESSAYS

possession of a Book, a chart of life, as it were, in which
the most important features of history and morals were
mapped out for the guidance of teachable men. The
heathen, on the contrary, were abandoned to their own
devices, and even prided themselves on following only
their spontaneous will, their habit, presumption, or caprice.

Most unprejudiced people would now agree that the
value of those sacred histories and rules of life did not
depend on their alleged miraculous origin, but rather on
that solidity and perspicacity in their authors which
enabled them to perceive the laws of sweet and profitable
conduct in this world. It was not religion merely that
was concerned, at least not that outlying, private, and
almost negligible sphere to which we often apply this
name ; it was the whole fund of experience mankind had
gathered by living ; it was wisdom. Now, to record these
lessons of experience, the Greeks and Romans also had
their Books ; their history, poetry, science, and civil law.
So that while the theologically heathen may be those
who have no Bible, the morally and essentially heathen
are those who possess no authoritative wisdom, or reject
the authority of what wisdom they have ; the untaught
or unteachable who disdain not only revelation but what
revelation stood for among early peoples, namely, funded
experience.

In this sense the Greeks were the least heathen of men.
They were singularly docile to political experiment, to
law, to methodical art, to the proved limitations and re
sources of mortal life. This life they found closely hedged
about by sky, earth, and sea, by war, madness, and con
science with their indwelling deities, by oracles and local
genii with their accustomed cults, by a pervasive fate,
and the jealousy of invisible gods. Yet they saw that
these divine forces were constant, and that they exercised
their pressure and bounty with so much method that a
prudent art and religion could be built up in their midst.
All this was simply a poetic prologue to science and
the arts ; it largely passed into them, and would have
passed into them altogether if the naturalistic genius of
Greece had not been crossed in Socrates by a premature
discouragement, and diverted into other channels.

HEATHENISM 217

Early Hebraism itself had hardly been so wise. It
had regarded its tribal and moral interests as absolute,
and the Creator as the champion and omnipotent agent
of Israel. But this arrogance and inexperience were
heathen. Soon the ascendency of Israel over nature
and history was proclaimed to be conditional on their
fidelity to the Law ; and as the spirit of the nation under
chastisement became more and more penitential, it was
absorbed increasingly in the praise of wisdom. Salvation
was to come only by repentance, by being born again with
a will wholly transformed and broken ; so that the later
Jewish religion went almost as far as Platonism or Christi
anity in the direction opposite to heathenism.

This movement in the direction of an orthodox wisdom
was regarded as a progress in those latter days of antiquity
when it occurred, and it continued to be so regarded in
Christendom until the rise of romanticism. The most
radical reformers simply urged that the current orthodoxy,
religious or scientific, was itself imperfectly orthodox,
being corrupt, overloaded, too vague, or too narrow. As
every actual orthodoxy is avowedly incomplete and partly
ambiguous, a sympathetic reform of it is always in order.
Yet very often the reformers are deceived. What really
offends them may not be what is false in the received
orthodoxy, but what though true is uncongenial to them.
In that case heathenism, under the guise of a search for
a purer wisdom, is working in their souls against wisdom
of any sort. Such is the suspicion that Catholics would
throw on Protestantism, naturalists on idealism, and
conservatives generally on all revolutions.

But if ever heathenism needed to pose as constructive
reform, it is now quite willing and able to throw off the
mask. Desire for any orthodox wisdom at all may be
repudiated ; it may be set down to low vitality and failure
of nerve. In various directions at once we see to-day
an intense hatred and disbelief gathering head against
the very notion of a cosmos to be discovered, or a stable
human nature to be respected. Nature, we are told, is
an artificial symbol employed by life ; truth is a temporary
convention ; art is an expression of personality ; war is
better than peace, effort than achievement, and feeling

218 LITTLE ESSAYS

than intelligence ; change is deeper than form ; will is
above morality. Expressions of this kind are sometimes
wanton and only half thought out ; but they go very deep
in the subjective direction. Behind them all is a sincere
revulsion against the difficult and confused undertakings
of reason ; against science, institutions, and moral com
pulsions. They mark an honest retreat into immediate
experience and animal faith. Man used to be called a
rational animal, but his rationality is something eventual
and ideal, whereas his animality is actual and profound.
Heathenism, if we consider life at large, is the primal and
universal religion.

It has never been my good fortune to see wild beasts
in the jungle, but I have sometimes watched a wild bull
in the ring, and I can imagine no more striking, simple,
and heroic example of animal faith ; especially when the
bull is what is technically called noble, that is, when he
follows the lure again and again with eternal singleness of
thought, eternal courage, and no suspicion of a hidden
agency that is mocking him. What the red rag is to this
brave creature, their passions, inclinations, and chance
notions are to the heathen. What they will they will ;
and they would deem it weakness and disloyalty to ask
whether it is worth willing or whether it is attainable.
The bull, magnificently sniffing the air, surveys the arena
with the cool contempt and disbelief of the idealist, as if
he said : " You seem, you are a seeming ; I do not quarrel
with you, I do not fear you. I am real, you are nothing."
Then suddenly, when his eye is caught by some bright
cloak displayed before him, his whole soul changes. His
will awakes and he seems to say : " You are my destiny ;
I want you, I hate you, you shall be mine, you shall not
stand in my path. I will gore you. I will disprove you.
I will pass beyond you. I shall be, you shall not have
been." Later, when sorely wounded and near his end,
he grows blind to all these excitements. He smells the
moist earth, and turns to the dungeon where an hour ago
he was at peace. He remembers the herd, the pasture
beyond, and he dreams : "I shall not die, for I love life.
I shall be young again, young always, for I love youth.
All this outcry is nought to me, this strange suffering is

HEATHENISM 219

nought. I will go to the fields again, to graze, to roam,
to love."

So exactly, with not one least concession to the un
suspected reality, the heathen soul stands bravely before
a painted world, covets some bauble, and defies death.
Heathenism is the religion of will, the faith which life
has in itself because it is life, and in its aims because it
is pursuing them.

PART V

LITTLE ESSAYS ON
MATERIALISM AND MORALS

221

8 7
MORAL NEUTRALITY OF MATERIALISM

MATERIALISM, like any system of natural philosophy,
carries with it no commandments and no advice. It
merely describes the world, including the aspirations and
consciences of mortals, and refers all to a material ground.
The materialist, being a man, will not fail to have pre
ferences, and even a conscience, of his own ; but his
precepts and policy will express, not the logical implications
of his science, but his human instincts, as inheritance
and experience may have shaped them. Any system of
ethics might accordingly coexist with materialism ; for if
materialism declares certain things (like immortality) to
be impossible, it cannot declare them to be undesirable.
Nevertheless, it is not likely that a man so constituted as to
embrace materialism will be so constituted as to pursue
things which he considers unattainable. There is therefore
a psychological, though no logical, bond between materialism
and a homely morality.

The materialist is primarily an observer ; and he will
probably be such in ethics also ; that is, he will have no
ethics, except the emotion produced upon him by the
march of the world. If he is an esprit fort and really
disinterested, he will love life ; as we all love perfect
vitality, or what strikes us as such, in gulls and porpoises.
This, I think, is the ethical sentiment psychologically
consonant with a vigorous materialism : sympathy with
the movement of things, interest in the rising wave, delight
at the foam it bursts into, before it sinks again. Nature
does not distinguish the better from the worse, but the
lover of nature does. He calls better what, being analogous
to his own life, enhances his vitality and probably possesses

223

224 LITTLE ESSAYS

some vitality of its own. This is the ethical feeling of
Spinoza, the greatest of modern naturalists in philosophy ;
and Lucretius, in spite of his fidelity to the ascetic Epicurus,
is carried by his poetic ecstasy in the same direction.

But mark the crux of this union : the materialist will
love the life of nature when he loves his own life ; if he
should hate his own life, how should the life of nature
please him ? Now Epicurus, for the most part, hated life.
His moral system, called hedonism, recommends that sort
of pleasure which has no excitement and no risk about it.
This ideal is modest, and even chaste, but it is not vital.
Epicurus was remarkable for his mercy, his friendliness,
his utter horror of war, of sacrifice, of suffering. These
are not sentiments that a genuine naturalist would be apt
to share. Pity and repentance, Spinoza said, were vain
and evil ; what increased a man s power and his joy
increased his goodness also. The naturalist will believe
in a certain hardness, as Nietzsche did ; he will incline to
a certain scorn, as the laughter of Democritus was scornful.
He will not count too scrupulously the cost of what he
achieves ; he will be an imperialist, rapt in the joy of
achieving something. In a word, the moral hue of
materialism in a formative age, or in an aggressive mind,
would be aristocratic and imaginative ; but in a decadent
age, or in a soul that is renouncing everything, it would
be, as in Epicurus, humanitarian and timidly sensual.

88
VALUE IRRATIONAL

SINCE the days of Descartes it has been a conception
familiar to philosophers that every visible event in nature
might be explained by previous visible events, and that all
the motions, for instance, of the tongue in speech, or of
the hand in painting, might have merely physical causes.
If consciousness is thus accessory to life and not essential
to it, the race of man might have existed upon the earth
and acquired all the arts necessary for its subsistence
without possessing a single sensation, idea, or emotion.
Natural selection might have secured the survival of

VALUE IRRATIONAL 225

those automata which made useful reactions upon their
environment. An instinct of self-preservation would have
been developed, dangers would have been shunned without
being feared, and injuries avenged without being felt.

In such a world there might have come to be the most
perfect organization. There would have been what we
should call the expression of the deepest interests and the
apparent pursuit of conceived goods. For there would
have been spontaneous and ingrained tendencies to avoid
certain contingencies and to produce others ; all the
dumb show and evidence of thinking would have been
patent to the observer ; he might have feigned ends and
objects of forethought, as in the case of the water that
seeks its own level, or of the vacuum which nature abhors.
But the particles of matter would have remained uncon
scious of their collocation, and all nature would have been
insensible of their changing arrangement. We only, the
possible spectators of that process, by virtue of our own
interests and habits, could see any progress or culmination
in it. We should see culmination where the result attained
satisfied our practical or aesthetic demands, and progress
wherever such a satisfaction was approached. But apart
from ourselves, and our human bias, we can see in such a
mechanical world no element of value whatever. In remov
ing consciousness, we have removed the possibility of worth.

But it is not only in the absence of all consciousness
that value would be removed from the world ; by a less
violent abstraction from the total life of nature, we might
conceive beings of a purely intellectual cast, minds in
which the transformations of things were mirrored without
any emotion. Every event would then be noted, its
relations would be observed, its recurrence might even
be expected ; but all this would happen without a shadow
of desire, of pleasure, or of regret. No event would be
repulsive, no situation terrible. We might, in a word,
have a world of idea without a world of will. In this case,
as completely as if consciousness were absent altogether,
all value and excellence would be gone. So that for the
existence of good in any form it is not merely consciousness
but emotional consciousness that is needed. Observation
will not do, appreciation is required.

Q

226 LITTLE ESSAYS

We may therefore at once assert this axiom, important
for all moral philosophy and fatal to certain stubborn
incoherences of thought, that there is no value apart
from some appreciation of it, and no good apart, from some
preference of it before its absence or its opposite. In
appreciation, in preference, lies the root and essence of
all excellence. Or, as Spinoza clearly expresses it, we
desire nothing because it is good, but it is good only because
we desire it.

It is true that in the absence of an instinctive reaction
we can still apply these epithets by an appeal to usage.
We may agree that an action is bad, or a building good,
because we recognize in them a character which we have
learned to designate by that adjective ; but unless there is
in us some trace of passionate reprobation or of sensible
delight, there is no moral or aesthetic judgment. It is all
a question of propriety of speech, and of the empty titles
of things. The verbal and mechanical proposition, that
passes for judgment of worth, is the great cloak of ineptitude
in these matters. Insensibility is very quick in the con
ventional use of words. If we appealed more often to
actual feeling, our judgments would be more diverse,
but they would be more legitimate and instructive.

Values spring from the immediate and inexplicable
reaction of vital impulse, and from the irrational part
@f our nature. The rational part is by its essence relative ;
it leads us from data to conclusions, or from parts to
wholes ; it never furnishes the data with which it works.
If any preference or precept were declared to be ultimate
and primitive, it would thereby be declared to be irrational,
since mediation, inference, and synthesis are the essence
of rationality. The ideal of rationality is itself as arbitrary,
as much dependent on the needs of a finite organization,
as any other ideal. Only as ultimately securing tran
quillity of mind, which the philosopher instinctively pursues,
has it for him any necessity. In spite of the verbal pro
priety of saying that reason demands rationality, what
really demands rationality, what makes it a good and
indispensable thing and gives it all its authority, is not
its own nature, but our need of it both in safe and economical
action and in the pleasures of comprehension.

EMOTIONS OF THE MATERIALIST 227

89
EMOTIONS OF THE MATERIALIST

A THEORY is not an unemotional thing. If music can be
full of passion, merely by giving form to a single sense,
how with much more beauty or terror may not a vision
be pregnant which brings order and method into every
thing that we know. Materialism has its distinct aesthetic
and emotional colour, though this may be strangely affected
and even reversed by contrast with systems of an incon
gruous hue, jostling it accidentally in a confused and
amphibious mind. If you are in the habit of believing
in special providences, or of expecting to continue your
romantic adventures in a second life, materialism will
dash your hopes most unpleasantly, and you may think
for a year or two that you have nothing left to live for.
But a thorough materialist, one born to the faith and
not half plunged into it by an unexpected christening in
cold water, will be like the superb Democritus, a laughing
philosopher. His delight in a mechanism that can fall
into so many marvellous and beautiful shapes, and can
generate so many exciting passions, should be of the same
intellectual quality as that which the visitor feels in a
museum of natural history, where he views the myriad
butterflies in their cases, the flamingoes and shell-fish, the
mammoths and gorillas. Doubtless there were pangs
in that incalculable life, but they were soon over ; and
how splendid meantime was the pageant, how infinitely
interesting the universal interplay, and how foolish and
inevitable those absolute little passions. Somewhat of
that sort might be the sentiment that materialism would
arouse in a vigorous mind, active, joyful, impersonal, and
in respect to private illusions not without a touch of
scorn.

To the genuine sufferings of living creatures the ethics
that accompanies materialism has never been insensible ;
on the contrary, like other merciful systems, it has trembled
too much at pain and tended to withdraw the will ascetic-
ally, lest the will should be defeated. Contempt for

228 LITTLE ESSAYS

mortal sorrows is reserved for those who drive with hosannas
the Juggernaut car of absolute optimism. But against
evils born of pure vanity and self-deception, against the
verbiage by which man persuades himself that he is the
goal and acme of the universe, laughter is the proper
defence. Laughter also has this subtle advantage, that
it need not remain without an overtone of sympathy and
brotherly understanding ; as the laughter that greets
Don Quixote s absurdities and misadventures does not
mock the hero s intent. His ardour was admirable, but
the world must be known before it can be reformed pertin
ently, and happiness, to be attained, must be placed in
reason.

Oblivious of Democritus, the unwilling materialists
of our day have generally been awkwardly intellectual
and quite incapable of laughter. If they have felt any
thing, they have felt melancholy. Their allegiance and
affection were still fixed on those mythical sentimental
worlds which they saw to be illusory. The mechanical
world they believed in could not please them, in spite
of its extent and fertility. When their imagination was
chilled they spoke of nature, most unwarrantably, as
dead, and when their judgment was heated they took
the next step and called it unreal. A man is not blind,
however, because every part of his body is not an eye,
nor every muscle in his eye a nerve sensitive to light.
Why, then, is nature dead, although it swarms with living
organisms, if every part is not obviously animate ? And
why is the sun dark and cold, if it is bright and hot only
to animal sensibility ? This senseless lamentation is like
the sophism of those Indian preachers who, to make men
abandon the illusions of self-love, dilated on the shocking
contents of the human body. Take off the skin, they cried,
and you will discover nothing but loathsome bleeding and
quivering substances. Yet the inner organs are well enough
in their place and doubtless pleasing to the microbes that
inhabit them ; and a man is not hideous because his
cross-section would not offer the features of a beautiful
countenance. So the structure of the world is not therefore
barren or odious because, if you removed its natural outer
aspect and effects, it would not make an interesting land-

EMOTIONS OF THE MATERIALIST 229

scape. Beauty being an appearance and life an operation,
that is surely beautiful and living which so operates and
so appears as to manifest those qualities.

It is true that materialism prophesies an ultimate
extinction for man and all his works. The horror which
this prospect inspires in the natural man might be mitigated
by reflection ; but, granting the horror, is it something
introduced by mechanical theories and not present in
experience itself ? Are human things inwardly stable ?
Do they belong to the eternal in any sense in which the
operation of material forces can touch their immortality ?
The panic which seems to seize some minds at the thought
of a merely natural existence is something truly hysterical ;
and yet one wonders why ultimate peace should seem so
intolerable to people who not so many years ago found
a stern religious satisfaction in consigning almost the whole
human race to perpetual torture, the Creator, as Saint
Augustine tells us, having in his infinite wisdom and justice
devised a special kind of material fire that might avail
to burn resurrected bodies for ever without consuming
them. A very real truth might be read into this savage
symbol, if we understood it to express the ultimate defeats
and fruitless agonies that pursue human folly ; and so
we might find that it gave mythical expression to just
that conditioned fortune and inexorable flux which a
mechanical philosophy shows us the grounds of. Our
own vices in another man seem particularly hideous ; and
so those actual evils which we take for granted when
incorporated in the current system strike us afresh when
we see them in a new setting. But it is not mechanical
science that introduced mutability into things nor material
ism that invented death.

The death of individuals, as we observe daily in nature,
does not prevent the reappearance of life ; and if we choose
to indulge in arbitrary judgments on a subject where data
fail us, we may as reasonably wish that there might be
less life as that there might be more. The passion for a
large and permanent population in the universe is not
obviously rational ; at a great distance a man must view
everything, including himself, under the form of eternity,
and when life is so viewed its length or its diffusion becomes

230 LITTLE ESSAYS

a point of little importance. What matters then is quality.
The reasonable and humane demand to make of the world
is that such creatures as exist should not be unhappy,
and that life, whatever its quantity, should have a quality
that may justify it in its own eyes. This just demand,
made by conscience and not by an arbitrary fancy, the
world described by materialism does not fulfil altogether,
for adjustments in it are tentative, and much friction must
precede and follow upon any vital equilibrium attained.
This imperfection, however, is actual, and no theory can
overcome it except by verbal fallacies and scarcely decep
tive euphemisms. What materialism involves in this
respect is exactly what we find : a tentative appearance
of life in many quarters, its disappearance in some, and
its reinforcement and propagation in others, where the
physical equilibrium attained insures to it a natural stability
and a natural prosperity.

To pass beyond good and evil is to reach a sublime neces
sity which, to an unselfish and pure intellect, may seem a
grander thing. All depends on not being afraid to confess
that the universe is non-human, and that man is relative.
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own
finitude, and his finitude itself is, in one sense, overcome.
A part of his soul, in sympathy with the infinite, has
accepted the natural status of all the rest of his being.
Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to
despise himself. When he attains this dignity all things
lose what was threatening and sinister about them, without
needing to change their material form or their material
influence. Man s intellectual part and his worshipping
part have made their peace with the world.

90
SADNESS OF NATURALISM

IT is a remarkable fact, which may easily be misinter
preted, that while all the benefits and pleasures of life
seem to be associated with external things, and all certain
knowledge seems to describe material laws, yet a deified

SADNESS OF NATURALISM 231

nature has generally inspired a religion of melancholy.
Why should the only intelligible philosophy seem to defeat
reason and the chief means of benefiting mankind seem to
blast our best hopes ? Whence this profound aversion to
so beautiful and fruitful a universe ? Whence this persist
ent search for invisible regions and powers and for meta
physical explanations that can explain nothing, while
nature s voice without and within man cries aloud to him
to look, act, and enjoy ? And when some one, in protest
against such senseless oracular prejudices, has actually
embraced the life and faith of nature and taught others
to look to the natural world for all motives and sanctions,
expecting thus to refresh and marvellously to invigorate
human life, why have those innocent hopes failed so
miserably ? Why is that sensuous optimism we may call
Greek, or that industrial optimism we may call American,
such a thin disguise for despair ? Why does each melt
away and become a mockery at the first approach of
reflection ? Why has man s conscience in the end invari
ably rebelled against naturalism and reverted in some form
or other to a cultus of the unseen ?

We may answer in the words of Saint Paul : because
things seen are temporal and things not seen are eternal.
And we may add that the eternal is the truly human,
that which is akin to the first indispensable products of
intelligence, which arise by the fusion of successive images
in discourse, and transcend the particular in time, peopling
the mind with permanent and recognizable objects, and
strengthening it with a synthetic, dramatic apprehension
of itself and its own experience. Concretion in existence,
on the contrary, yields essentially detached and empirical
unities, foreign to mind in spite of their order, and unin
telligible in spite of their clearness. Reason fails to
assimilate in them precisely that which makes them
existent, namely, their presence here and now, in this
order and number. The form and quality of them we can
retain, domesticate, and weave into the texture of reflec
tion, but their existence and individuality remain a dogma
of sense needing to be verified anew at every moment and
actually receiving continual verification or disproof while
we live in this world.

232 LITTLE ESSAYS

" This world " we call it, not without justifiable pathos,
for many other worlds are conceivable and if discovered
might prove more rational and intelligible and more akin
to the soul than this strange universe which man has
hitherto always looked upon with increasing astonishment.
The materials of experience are no sooner in hand than
they are transformed by intelligence, reduced to those
permanent presences, those natures and relations, which
alone can live in discourse. Those materials, rearranged
into the abstract summaries we call history or science, or
pieced out into the reconstructions and extensions we call
poetry or religion, furnish us with ideas of as many dream
worlds as we please, all nearer to reason s ideal than is the
actual chaos of perceptual experience, and some nearer
to the heart s desire. When an empirical philosophy,
therefore, calls us back from the irresponsible flights of
imagination to the shock of sense and tries to remind us
that in this alone we touch existence and come upon fact,
we feel dispossessed of our nature and cramped in our life.
The actuality possessed by existence cannot make up for
its instability, nor the applicability of scientific principles
for their hypothetical character. The dependence upon
sense, which we are reduced to when we consider the world
of existences, becomes a too plain hint of our essential
impotence and mortality, while the play of logical fancy,
though it remain inevitable, is saddened by a consciousness
of its own insignificance.

That dignity, then, which inheres in logical ideas and
their affinity to moral enthusiasm, springs from their
congruity with the primary habits of intelligence and
idealization. The soul or self or personality, which in
sophisticated social life is so much the centre of passion
and concern, is itself an idea, a concretion in discourse ;
and the level on which it swims comes to be, by association
and affinity, the region of all the more vivid and massive
human interests. The pleasures which lie beneath it are
ignored, and the ideals which lie above it are not perceived.
Aversion to an empirical or naturalistic philosophy accord
ingly expresses a sort of logical patriotism and attachment
to homespun idea?. The actual is too remote and un
friendly to the dreamer ; to understand it he has to learn

SADNESS OF NATURALISM 233

a foreign tongue, which his native prejudice imagines to
be unmeaning and unpoetical. The truth is, however,
that nature s language is too rich for man ; and the dis
comfort he feels when he is compelled to use it merely
marks his lack of education. There is nothing cheaper
than idealism. It can be had by merely not observing the
ineptitude of our chance prejudices, and by declaring
that the first rhymes that have struck our ear are the eternal
and necessary harmonies of the world.

With nature so full of stuff before him, I can hardly
conceive what morbid instinct can tempt a man to look
elsewhere for wider vistas, unless it be unwillingness to
endure the sadness and the discipline of the truth.

If it be true that matter is sinful, the logic of this truth
is far from being what the fanatics imagine who commonly
propound it. Matter is sinful only because it is insuffi
cient or is wastefully distributed. There is not enough
of it to go round among the legion of hungry ideas. To
embody or enact an idea is the only way of making it
actual : but its embodiment may mutilate it, if the material
or the situation is not propitious. So an infant may be
maimed at birth, when what injures him is not being
brought forth, but being brought forth in the wrong manner.
Matter has a double function in respect to moral life :
essentially it enables the spirit to be, yet chokes it inci
dentally. Men sadly misbegotten, or those who are
thwarted at every step by the times penury, may fall to
thinking of matter only by its defect, ignoring the material
ground of their own aspirations. All flesh will seem to
them weak, except that forgotten piece of it which makes
their own spiritual strength. Every impulse, however,
had initially the same authority as this censorious one,
by which the others are now judged and condemned.

Throw open to the young poet the infinity of nature ;
let him feel the precariousness of life, the variety of pur
poses, civilizations, and religions even upon this little
planet ; let him trace the triumphs and follies of art and
philosophy, and their perpetual resurrections. If, under
the stimulus of such a scene, he does not some day compose
a natural comedy as much surpassing Dante s divine
comedy in sublimity and richness as it will surpass it in

234 LITTLE ESSAYS

truth, the fault will not lie with the subject, which is
inviting and magnificent, but with the halting genius that
cannot render that subject worthily.

Undoubtedly, the universe so displayed would not
be without its dark shadows and its perpetual tragedies.
That is in the nature of things. Dante s cosmos, for all
its mythical idealism, was not so false as not to have a
hell in it. Those rolling spheres, with all their lights and
music, circled for ever about hell. Perhaps in the real life of
nature evil may not prove to be so central as that. It
would seem to be rather a sort of inevitable but incidental
friction, capable of being diminished indefinitely, as the
world is better known and the will is better educated. In
Dante s spheres there could be no discord whatever ;
but at the core of them was eternal woe. In the star-dust
of our physics discords are everywhere, and harmony
is only tentative and approximate, as it is in the best
earthly life ; but at the core there is nothing sinister, only
freedom, innocence, inexhaustible possibilities of all sorts
of happiness.

HAPPINESS IN DISILLUSION

WHY the world appears as it does, whether of itself or by
refraction in the medium of our intellect, is not a question
that affects the practical moralist. What concerns him
is that the laws of the world, whatever their origin, are
fixed and unchangeable conditions of our happiness. We
cannot change the world, even if we boast that we have
made it ; we must in any case learn to live with it, whether
it be our parent or our child. To veil its character with
euphemisms or to supply its defects with superstitious
assumptions is a course unworthy of a brave man and
abhorrent to a prudent one. What we should do is to make
a modest inventory of our possessions and a just estimate
of our powers in order to apply both, with what strength
we have, to the realization of our ideals in society, in art,
and in science. These will constitute our Cosmos. In

HAPPINESS IN DISILLUSION 235

building it for there is none other that builds it for us
we shall be carrying on the work of the only race that
has yet seriously attempted to live rationally, the race
to which we owe the name and the idea of a Cosmos, as
well as the beginnings of its realization. We shall then
be making that rare advance in wisdom which consists
in abandoning our illusions the better to attain our
ideals.

The deceptions which nature practises on man are not
always cruel. There are also kindly deceptions which
prompt him to pursue or expect his own good when, though
not destined to come in the form he looks for, this good
is really destined to come in some shape or other. Such,
for instance, are the illusions of romantic love, which may
really terminate in a family life practically better than
the absolute and chimerical unions which that love had
dreamed of. Such, again, are those illusions of conscience
which attach unspeakable vague penalties and repugnances
to acts which commonly have bad results, though these
are impossible to forecast with precision. When dis
illusion comes, while it may bring a momentary shock, it
ends by producing a settled satisfaction unknown before,
a satisfaction which the coveted prize, could it have been
attained, would hardly have secured. When on the day
of judgment, or earlier, a man perceives that what he
thought he was doing for the Lord s sake he was really
doing for the benefit of the least, perhaps, of the Lord s
creatures, his satisfaction, after a moment s surprise,
will certainly be very genuine.

92
THE TRUE PLACE OF MATERIALISM

MATERIALISM is not a system of metaphysics ; it is a specu
lation in chemistry and physiology, to the effect that, if
analysis could go deep enough, it would find that all sub
stance was homogeneous, and that all motion was regular.
The atoms of Democritus seem to us gross, even for

236 LITTLE ESSAYS

chemistry, and their quality would have to undergo great
transformation if they were to support intelligibly psychic
being as well ; but that very grossness and false simplicity
had its merits, and science must be for ever grateful to
the man who at its inception could so clearly formulate
its mechanical ideal. That the world is not so intelligible
as we could wish is not to be wondered at. In other
respects also it fails to respond to our demands ; yet our
hope must be to find it more propitious to the intellect
as well as to all the arts in proportion as we learn better
how to live in it.

The atoms of what we call hydrogen or oxygen may
well turn out to be worlds, as the stars are which make
atoms for astronomy. Their inner organization might
be negligible on our rude plane of being ; did it disclose
itself, however, it would be intelligible in its turn only if
constant parts and constant laws were discernible within
each system. So that while atomism at a given level may
not be a final or metaphysical truth, it will describe, on
every level, the practical and efficacious structure of the
world. We owe to Democritus this ideal of practical
intelligibility ; and he is accordingly an eternal spokesman
of reason. His system, long buried with other glories
of the world, has been partly revived ; and although it
cannot be verified in haste, for it represents an ultimate
ideal, every advance in science reconstitutes it in some
particular. Mechanism is not one principle of explanation
among others. In natural philosophy, where to explain
means to discover origins, transmutations, and laws,
mechanism is explanation itself. But it does not ask to
be worshipped. A theoretical materialist, who looks on
the natural world as on a soil that he has risen from and
feeds on, may perhaps feel a certain piety towards those
obscure abysses of nature that have given him birth ;
but his delight will be rather in the clear things of the
imagination, in the humanities, by which the rude forces
of nature are at once expressed and eluded.

INTUITIVE MORALITY 237

93
INTUITIVE MORALITY

To one brought up in a sophisticated society, or in particular
under an ethical religion, morality seems at first an external
command, a chilling and arbitrary set of requirements
and prohibitions which the young heart, if it trusted itself,
would not reckon at a penny s worth. Yet while this
rebellion is brewing in the secret conclave of the passions,
the passions themselves are prescribing a code. They
are inventing gallantry and kindness and honour ; they
are discovering friendship and paternity. With maturity
comes the recognition that the authorized precepts of
morality were essentially not arbitrary ; that they ex
pressed the genuine aims and interests of a practised will ;
that their alleged alien and supernatural basis (which if real
would have deprived them of all moral authority) was but
a mythical cover for their forgotten natural springs. Virtue
is then seen to be admirable essentially, and not merely
by conventional imputation. If traditional morality has
much in it that is out of proportion, much that is unintelli
gent and inert, nevertheless it represents on the whole
the verdict of reason. It speaks for a typical human
will chastened by a typical human experience.

Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome,
and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion
they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an
opposite one, no less wise, to balance it ; so that a man
rich in such lore, like Sancho Panza, can always find a
venerable maxim to fortify the view he happens to be
taking. In respect to foresight, for instance, we are told,
Make hay while the sun shines, A stitch in time saves nine,
Honesty is the best policy, Murder will out, Woe unto you,
ye hypocrites, Watch and pray, Seek salvation with fear
and trembling, and Respice finem. But on the same
authorities exactly we have apposite maxims, inspired by
a feeling that mortal prudence is fallible, that life is shorter
than policy, and that only the present is real ; for we
hear, A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, Carpe

238 LITTLE ESSAYS

diem, Ars longa, vita brevis, Be not righteous overmuch,
Enough for the day is the evil thereof, Behold the lilies
of the field, Judge not, that ye be not judged, Mind your
own business, and It takes all sorts of men to make a world.
So when some particularly shocking thing happens one
man says, Cherchez la femme, and another says, Great is
Allah.

That these maxims should be so various and partial is
quite intelligible when we consider how they spring up.
Every man, in moral reflection, is animated by his own
intent ; he has something in view which he prizes, he
knows not why, and which wears to him the essential
and unquestionable character of a good. With this
standard before his eyes, he observes easily for love and
hope are extraordinarily keen-sighted what in action
or in circumstances forwards his purpose and what thwarts
it ; and at once the maxim comes, very likely in the
language of the particular instance before him. Now the
interests that speak in a man are different at different
times ; and the outer facts or measures which in one case
promote that interest may, where other less obvious con
ditions have changed, altogether defeat it. Hence all
sorts of precepts looking to all sorts of results.

Prescriptions of this nature differ enormously in value ;
for they differ enormously in scope. By chance intuitive
maxims may be so central, so expressive of ultimate aims,
so representative, I mean, of all aims in fusion, that they
merely anticipate what moral science would have come to
if it had existed. This happens much as in physics ultimate
truths may be divined by poets long before they are dis
covered by investigators ; the vivida vis animi taking
the place of much recorded experience, because much
unrecorded experience has secretly fed it. Such, for
instance, is the central maxim of Christianity, Love thy
neighbour as thyself. On the other hand, what is usual
in intuitive codes is a mixture of some elementary precepts,
necessary to any society, with others representing local
traditions or ancient rites : so Thou shalt not kill, and
Thou shalt keep holy the Sabbath day, figure side by side
in the Decalogue. When Antigone, in her sublimest
exaltation, defies human enactments and appeals to laws

INTUITIVE MORALITY

239

which are not of to-day nor yesterday, no man knowing
whence they have arisen, she mixes various types of obliga
tion in a most instructive fashion ; for a superstitious
horror at leaving a body unburied something decidedly
of yesterday gives poignancy in her mind to natural
affection for a brother something indeed universal, yet
having a well-known origin. The passionate assertion of
right is here, in consequence, more dramatic than spiritual ;
and even its dramatic force has suffered somewhat by the
change in ruling ideals.

Intuitive ethics has nothing to offer in the presence of
discord except an appeal to force and to ultimate physical
sanctions. It can instigate, but cannot resolve, the battle
of nations and the battle of religions. Precisely the same
zeal, the same patriotism, the same readiness for martyrdom
fires adherents to rival societies, and fires them especially
in view of the fact that the adversary is no less uncom
promising and fierce. It might seem idle, if not cruel and
malicious, to wish to substitute one historical allegiance
for another, when both are equally arbitrary, and the
existing one is the more congenial to those born under it ;
but to feel this aggression to be criminal demands some
degree of imagination and justice, and sectaries would not
be sectaries if they possessed it.

Truly religious minds, while eager perhaps to extirpate
every religion but their own, often rise above national
jealousies ; for spirituality is universal, whatever churches
may be. Similarly politicians often understand very well
the religious situation ; and of late it has become again
the general practice among prudent governments to do
as the Romans did in their conquests, and to leave people
free to exercise what religion they have, without pestering
them with a foreign one. On the other hand the same
politicians are the avowed agents of a quite patent iniquity ;
for what is their ideal ? To substitute their own language,
commerce, soldiers, and tax-gatherers for the tax-gatherers,
soldiers, commerce, and language of their neighbours ;
and no means is thought illegitimate, be it fraud in policy
or bloodshed in war, to secure this absolutely nugatory
end. Is not one country as much a country as another ?
Is it not as dear to its inhabitants ? What then is

240 LITTLE ESSAYS

gained by oppressing its genius or by seeking to destroy it
altogether ?

Here are two flagrant instances where pre- rational
morality defeats the ends of morality. Viewed from
within, each religious or national fanaticism stands for a
good ; but in its outward operation it produces and be
comes an evil. It is possible, no doubt, that its agents
are really so far apart in nature and ideals that, like men
and mosquitoes, they can stand in physical relations only,
and if they meet can meet only to poison or to crush one
another. More probably, however, humanity in them is no
merely nominal essence ; it is definable ideally by a partially
identical function and intent. In that case, by studying
their own nature, they could rise above their mutual
opposition, and feel that in their fanaticism they were
taking too contracted a view of their own souls and were
hardly doing justice to themselves when they did such
great injustice to others.

94
RELATIVITY OF VALUES

I CANNOT help thinking that a consciousness of the
relativity of values, if it became prevalent, would tend
to render people more truly social than would a belief that
things have intrinsic and unchangeable values, no matter
what the attitude of any one to them may be. If we
said that goods, including the right distribution of goods,
are relative to specific natures, moral warfare would
continue, but not with poisoned arrows. Our private
sense of justice itself would be acknowledged to have but
a relative authority, and while we could not have a higher
duty than to follow it, we should seek to meet those whose
aims were incompatible with it as we meet things physically
inconvenient, without insulting them as if they were
morally vile or logically contemptible. Real unselfishness
consists in sharing the interests of others. Beyond the
pale of actual unanimity the only possible unselfishness
is chivalry a recognition of the inward right and justifica-

RELATIVITY OF VALUES 241

tion of our enemies fighting against us. This chivalry has
long been practised in the battle-field without abolishing
the causes of war ; and it might conceivably be extended
to all the conflicts of men with one another, and of the
warring elements within each breast. Policy, hypnotiza-
tion, and even surgery may be practised without exorcisms
or anathemas. When a man has decided on a course of
action, it is a vain indulgence in expletives to declare that
he is sure that course is absolutely right. His moral
dogma expresses its natural origin all the more clearly the
more hotly it is proclaimed ; and ethical absolutism, being a
mental grimace of passion, refutes what it says by what
it is. Sweeter and more profound, to my sense, is the
philosophy of Homer, whose every line seems to breathe
the conviction that what is beautiful or precious has not
thereby any right to existence ; nothing has such a right ;
nor is it given us to condemn absolutely any force god
or man that destroys what is beautiful or precious, for
it has doubtless something beautiful or precious of its
own to achieve.

If we were sure of our ground, we should be willing to
acquiesce in the naturally different feelings and ways of
others, as a man who is conscious of speaking his language
with the accent of the capital confesses its arbitrariness with
gaiety, and is pleased and interested in the variations of
it he observes in provincials ; but the provincial is always
zealous to show that he has reason and ancient authority
to justify his oddities. So people who have no sensations,
and do not know why they judge, are always trying to
show that they judge by universal reason.

It is unmeaning to say that what is beautiful to one man
ought to be beautiful to another. Evidently this obligation
of recognizing the same qualities is conditioned by the
possession of the same faculties. But no two men have
exactly the same faculties, nor can things have for any two
exactly the same values. If their natures are different,
the form which to one will be entrancing will be to another
even invisible. And more : incapacity to appreciate
certain types of beauty may be the condition sine qua non
for the appreciation of another kind ; the greatest capacity
both for enjoyment and for creation is highly specialized,

R

242 LITTLE ESSAYS

and the greatest ages of art have often been strangely
intolerant.

What is loosely expressed by saying that any one ought
to see this or that beauty is that he would see it if his
disposition, training, or attention were what our ideal
demands for him ; and our ideal of what any one should
be has complex but discoverable sources. We take, for
instance, a certain pleasure in having our own judgments
supported by those of others ; we are intolerant, if not
of the existence of a nature different from our own, at
least of its expression in words and judgments. We are
confirmed or made happy in our doubtful opinions by seeing
them accepted universally. If the animals could only speak
the Inquisition would have had a pretty work on its hands.

There is no need of refuting anything, for the will which
is behind all ideals and behind most dogmas cannot itself
be refuted ; but it may be enlightened and led to reconsider
its intent, when its satisfaction is seen to be either naturally
impossible or inconsistent with better things. The age of
controversy is past ; that of interpretation has succeeded.

95
AUTHORITY OF REASON IN MORALS

THE objects of human desire until reason has compared
and experience has tested them, are a miscellaneous assort
ment of goods, unstable in themselves and incompatible
with one another. It is a happy chance if a tolerable
mixture of them recommends itself to a prophet or finds
an adventitious acceptance among a group of men.
Intuitive morality is adequate while it simply enforces
those obvious and universal laws which are indispensable
to any society, and which impose themselves everywhere
on men under pain of quick extinction a penalty which
many an individual and many a nation continually prefers
to pay. But when intuitive morality tries to guide progress,
its magic fails. Ideals are tentative and have to be
critically viewed. A moralist who rests in his intuitions
may be a good preacher, but hardly deserves the name of

AUTHORITY OF REASON IN MORALS 243

philosopher. He cannot find any authority for his maxims
which opposite maxims may not equally invoke. To
settle the relative merits of rival authorities and of hostile
consciences it is necessary to appeal to the only real
authority, to experience, reason, and human nature in the
living man. No other test is conceivable and no other
would be valid ; for no good man would ever consent to
regard an authority as divine or binding which essentially
contradicted his own conscience. Yet a conscience which
is irreflective and incorrigible is too hastily satisfied
with itself, and not conscientious enough : it needs
cultivation by dialectic. It neglects to extend to all
human interests that principle of synthesis and justice
by which conscience itself has arisen. And so soon as the
conscience summons its own dicta for revision in the light
of experience and of universal sympathy, it is no longer
called conscience, but reason. So, too, when the spirit
summons its traditional faiths, to subject them to a similar
examination, that exercise is not called religion, but
philosophy. It is true, in a sense, that philosophy is the
purest religion and reason the ultimate conscience ; but so
to name them would be misleading. The things commonly
called by those names have seldom consented to live at
peace with sincere reflection. It has been felt vaguely
that reason could not have produced them, and that they
might suffer sad changes by submitting to it ; as if reason
could be the ground of anything, or as if everything might
not find its consummation in becoming rational.

There is one impulse which intuitive moralists ignore :
the impulse to reflect. Human instincts are ignorant,
multitudinous, and contradictory. To satisfy them as
they come is often impossible, and often disastrous, in
that such satisfaction prevents the satisfaction of other
instincts inherently no less fecund and legitimate. When
we apply reason to life we immediately demand that life
be consistent, complete, and satisfactory when reflected
upon and viewed as a whole. This view, as it presents
each moment in its relations, extends to all moments
affected by the action or maxim under discussion ; it has
no more ground for stopping at the limits of what is called
a single life than at the limits of a single adventure. To

244 LITTLE ESSAYS

stop at selfishness is not particularly rational. The same
principle that creates the ideal of a self creates the ideal of
a family or an institution.

The conflict between selfishness and altruism is like
that between any two ideal passions that in some particular
may chance to be opposed ; but such a conflict has no
obstinate existence for reason. For reason the person
itself has no obstinate existence. The character which a
man achieves at the best moment of his life is indeed
something ideal and significant ; it justifies and consecrates
all his coherent actions and preferences. But the man s
life, the circle drawn by biographers around the career of
a particular body, from the womb to the charnel-house,
and around the mental flux that accompanies that career,
is no significant unity. All the substances and efficient
processes that figure within it come from elsewhere and
continue beyond ; while all the rational objects and
interests to which it refers have a transpersonal status.
Self-love itself is concerned with public opinion ; and if
a man concentrates his view on private pleasures, these
may qualify the fleeting moments of his life with an intrinsic
value, but they leave the life itself shapeless and infinite,
as if sparks should play over a piece of burnt paper.

Rational morality is an embodiment of volition, not a
description of it. It is the expression of living interest,
preference, and categorical choice. It leaves to psychology
and history a free field for the description of moral
phenomena. It has no interest in slipping far-fetched
and incredible myths beneath the facts of nature, so as to
lend a non-natural origin to human aspirations. It even
recognizes, as an emanation of its own force, that un
compromising truthfulness with which science assigns all
forms of moral life to their place in the mechanical system
of nature. But the rational moralist is not on that account
reduced to a mere spectator, a physicist acknowledging
no interest except the interest in facts and in the laws
of change. His own spirit, small by the material forces
which it may stand for and express, is great by its preroga
tive of surveying and judging the universe ; surveying it,
of course, from a mortal point of view, and judging it only
by its kindliness or cruelty to some actual interest, yet,

AUTHORITY OF REASON IN MORALS 245

even so, determining unequivocally a part of its constitution
and excellence. The rational moralist represents a force
energizing in the world, discovering its affinities there
and clinging to them to the exclusion of their hateful
opposites. He represents, over against the chance facts,
an ideal embodying the particular demands, possibilities,
and satisfactions of a reflective being.

The radical impulses at work in any animal must
continue to speak while he lives, for they are his essence.
A true morality does not have to be adopted ; the parts
of it best practised are those which are never preached.
To be " converted " would be to pass from one self-betrayal
to another. It would be to found a new morality on a
new tyranny. The morality which has genuine authority
exists inevitably and speaks autonomously in every common
judgment, self-congratulation, ambition, or passion that
fills the vulgar day. The pursuit of those goods which are
the only possible or fitting crown of a man s life is pre
determined by his nature ; he cannot choose a law-giver,
nor accept one, for none who spoke to the purpose could
teach him anything btit to know himself. Rational life
is an art, not a slavery ; and terrible as may be the errors
and the apathy that impede its successful exercise, the
standard and goal of it are given intrinsically. Any task
imposed externally on a man is imposed by force only, a
force he has the right to defy so soon as he can do so without
creating some greater impediment to his natural vocation.

Those who are guided only by an irrational conscience
can hardly understand what a good life would be. Their
Utopias have to be supernatural in order that the irrespon
sible rules which they call morality may lead by miracle
to happy results. But such a magical and undeserved
happiness, if it were possible, would be unsavoury : only
one phase of human nature would be satisfied by it, and
so impoverished an ideal cannot really attract the will.
For human nature has been moulded by the same natural
forces among which its ideal has to be fulfilled, and, apart
from a certain margin of wild hopes and extravagances,
the things man s heart desires are attainable under his
natural conditions and would not be attainable elsewhere.
The conflict of desires and interests in the world is not

246 LITTLE ESSAYS

radical any more than man s dissatisfaction with his own
nature can be ; for every particular ideal, being an expres
sion of human nature in operation, must in the end involve
the primary human faculties and cannot be essentially
incompatible with any other ideal which involves them too.

To adjust all demands to one ideal and adjust that
ideal to its natural conditions in other words, to live
the life of reason is something perfectly possible ; for
those demands, being akin to one another in spite of
themselves, can be better furthered by co-operation than
by blind conflict, while the ideal, far from demanding any
profound revolution in nature, merely expresses her actual
tendency and forecasts what her perfect functioning
would be.

Reason as such represents or rather constitutes a single
formal interest, the interest in harmony. When two
interests are simultaneous and fall within one act of
apprehension the desirability of harmonizing them is
involved in the very effort to realize them together. If
attention and imagination are steady enough to face this
implication and not to allow impulse to oscillate between
irreconcilable tendencies, reason comes into being. Hence
forth things actual and things desired are confronted by
an ideal which has both pertinence and authority.

96
PLEASURE INGENUOUS

EVERY real pleasure is in one sense disinterested. It is
not sought with ulterior motives, and what fills the mind
is no calculation, but the image of an object or event,
suffused with emotion. A sophisticated consciousness may
often take the idea of self as the touchstone of its inclina
tions ; but this self, for the gratification and aggrandize
ment of which a man may live, is itself only a complex of
aims and memories, which once had their direct objects,
in which he had taken a spontaneous and ingenuous
interest. The substance of selfishness is a mass of un
selfishness. There is no reference to the nominal essence

PLEASURE INGENUOUS 247

called oneself either in one s appetites or in one s natural
affections ; yet a man absorbed in his meat and drink, in
his houses and lands, in his children and dogs, is called
selfish because these interests, although natural and instinc
tive in him, are not shared by others. Even our vanities
and follies are disinterested in their way. When a man
orders his tomb according to his taste, it is not in the hope
of enjoying his residence in it.

When moralists deprecate passion and contrast it with
reason, they do so, if they are themselves rational, only
because passion is so often " guilty," because it works
havoc so often in the surrounding world and leaves, among
other ruins, " a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed." Were
there no danger of such after-effects within and without the
sufferer, no passion would be reprehensible. Nature is
innocent, and so are all her impulses and moods when taken
in isolation ; it is only on meeting that they blush.

97
THE LOWER SENSES

ARTISTS in life, if that expression may be used for those
who have beautified social and domestic existence, have
appealed continually to the lower senses. A fragrant
garden, and savoury meats, incense, and perfumes, soft
stuffs, and delicious colours, form our ideal of oriental
luxuries, an ideal which appeals too much to human nature
ever to lose its charm. Yet our northern poets have seldom
attempted to arouse these images in their sensuous in
tensity, without relieving them by some imaginative touch.
In Keats, for example, we find the following lines :

And still she slept in azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth and lavendered,
While he from forth the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd,
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon ;
Manna and dates in argosy transferred
From Fez ; and spiced dainties, every one
From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon.

248 LITTLE ESSAYS

Even the most sensuous of English poets, in whom the
love of beauty is supreme, cannot keep long to the primal
elements of beauty ; the higher flight is inevitable for him.
And how much does not the appeal to things in argosy
transferred from Fez, reinforced with the reference to
Samarcand and especially to the authorized beauties of the
cedars of Lebanon, which even the Puritan may sing with
out a blush, add to our wavering satisfaction and reconcile
our conscience to this unchristian indulgence of sense !

But the time may be near when such scruples will be
less common, and our poetry, with our other arts, will
dwell nearer to the fountain-head of all inspiration. For if
nothing not once in sense is to be found in the intellect,
much less is such a thing to be found in the imagination.
If the cedars of Lebanon did not spread a grateful shade,
or the winds rustle through the maze of their branches, if
Lebanon had never been beautiful to sense, it would not now
be a fit or poetic subject of allusion. And the word " Fez "
would be without imaginative value if no traveller had
ever felt the intoxication of the torrid sun, or the languors
of oriental luxury. Nor would Samarcand be anything
but for the mystery of the desert and the picturesqueness
of caravans, nor would an argosy be poetic if the sea had
no voices and no foam, the winds and oars no resistance,
and the rudder and taut sheets no pull. From these real
sensations imagination draws its life, and suggestion its
power. The sweep of the fancy is itself also agreeable ;
but the superiority of the distant over the present is only
due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be
suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can
at any time be felt.

PLEASURE AND CONSCIENCE

HEDONISTIC ethics have always had to struggle against the
moral sense of mankind. Earnest minds, that feel the
weight and dignity of life, rebel against the assertion that
the aim of right conduct is enjoyment. Pleasure usually
appears to them as a temptation, and they sometimes go

PLEASURE AND CONSCIENCE 249

so far as to make avoidance of it a virtue. The truth is
that morality is not mainly concerned with the attainment
of pleasure ; it is rather concerned, in all its deeper and
more authoritative maxims, with the prevention of suffer
ing. There is something artificial in the deliberate pursuit
of pleasure ; there is something absurd in the obligation
to enjoy oneself. We feel no duty in that direction ; we
take to enjoyment naturally enough after the work of life
is done, and the freedom and spontaneity of our pleasures
is what is most essential to them.

The sad business of life is rather to escape certain dread
ful evils to which our nature exposes us, death, hunger,
disease, weariness, isolation, and contempt. By the awful
authority of these things, which stand like spectres behind
every moral injunction, conscience in reality speaks, and
a mind which they have duly impressed cannot but feel,
by contrast, the hopeless triviality of the search for
pleasure. A life abandoned to amusement and to chang
ing impulses must run unawares into fatal dangers. The
moment, however, that society emerges from the early
pressure of the environment and is tolerably secure against
primary evils, morality grows lax. The forms that life
will farther assume are not to be imposed by moral
authority, but are determined by the genius of the race,
the opportunities of the moment, and the tastes and
resources of individual minds. The reign of duty gives
place to the reign of freedom, and the law and the covenant
to the dispensation of grace.

99
THE WORTH OF PLEASURES AND PAINS

To put value in pleasure and pain, regarding a given
quantity of pain as balancing a given quantity of pleasure,
is to bring to practical ethics a worthy intention to be clear
and, what is more precious, an undoubted honesty not
always found in those moralists who maintain the opposite
opinion and care more for edification than for truth. For
in spite of all logical and psychological scruples, conduct

250 LITTLE ESSAYS

that should not justify itself somehow by the satisfactions
secured and the pains avoided would not justify itself at
all. The most instinctive and unavoidable desire is forth
with chilled if you discover that its ultimate end is to be
a preponderance of suffering ; and what arrests this desire
is not fear or weakness but conscience in its most categorical
and sacred guise. Who would not be ashamed to acknow
ledge or to propose so inhuman an action ?

By sad experience rooted impulses may be transformed
or even obliterated. A mind that foresees pain to be the
ultimate result of action cannot continue unreservedly to
act, seeing that its foresight is the conscious transcript
of a recoil already occurring. Conversely, the mind that
surrenders itself wholly to any impulse must think that
its execution would be delightful. A perfectly wise and
representative morality, therefore, would aim only at what,
in its attainment, could continue to be aimed at and
approved ; and this is another way of saying that its
aim would secure the maximum of satisfaction eventually
possible.

In spite, however, of this involution of pain and pleasure
in all deliberate forecast and volition, pain and pleasure
are not the ultimate sources of value. When Petrarch says
that a thousand pleasures are not worth one pain, he
establishes an ideal of value deeper than either pleasure or
pain, an ideal which makes a life of satisfaction marred by
a single pang an offence and a horror to his soul. If our
demand for rationality is less acute and the miscellaneous
affirmations of the will carry us along with a well-fed
indifference to some single tragedy within us, we may aver
that a single pang is only the thousandth part of a thousand
pleasures and that a life so balanced is nine hundred and
ninety-nine times better than nothing. This judgment,
for all its air of mathematical calculation, in truth expresses
a choice as irrational as Petrarch s. It merely means that,
as a matter of fact, the mixed prospect presented to us
attracts our wills and attracts them vehemently. So that
the only possible criterion for the relative values of pains
and pleasures is the will that chooses among them or among
combinations of them. All beliefs about future experi
ence, with all premonition of its emotional quality, are

THE WORTH OF PLEASURES AND PAINS 251

based on actual impulse and feeling ; so that the source
of estimation is nothing but the inner fountain of life and
imagination, and the object of pursuit nothing but the
ideal object, counterpart of the present demand. Abstract
satisfaction is not pursued, but, if the will and the environ
ment are constant, satisfaction will necessarily be felt in
achieving the object desired.

A rejection of hedonistic psychology, therefore, by no
means involves any opposition to eudaemonism in ethics.
Eudsemonism is another name for wisdom : there is no
other moral morality. Any system that, for some sinister
reason, should absolve itself from good-will toward all
creatures, and make it somehow a duty to secure their
misery, would be clearly disloyal to reason, humanity,
and justice. Nor would it be hard, in that case, to point
out what superstition, what fantastic obsession, or what
private fury had made those persons blind to prudence
and kindness in so plain a matter. Happiness is the only
sanction of life ; where happiness fails, existence remains
a mad and lamentable experiment. The question, how
ever, what happiness shall consist in, its complexion if it
should once arise, can only be determined by reference to
natural demands and capacities ; so that while satisfaction
by the attainment of ends can alone justify their pursuit,
this pursuit itself must exist first and be spontaneous,
thereby fixing the goals of endeavour and distinguishing
the states in which satisfaction might be found. Natural
disposition, therefore, is the principle of preference and
makes morality and happiness possible.

The polemic which certain moralists have waged
against pleasure and in favour of pain is intelligible when
we remember that their chief interest is edification, and
that ability to resist pleasure and pain alike is a valuable
virtue in a world where action and renunciation are the
twin keys to happiness. But to deny that pleasure is a
good and pain an evil is a grotesque affectation. A man
who without necessity deprived any person of a pleasure
or imposed on him a pain, would be a contemptible knave,
and the person so injured would be the first to declare it,
nor could the highest celestial tribunal, if it was just,
reverse that sentence. For it suffices that one being,

252 LITTLE ESSAYS

however weak, loves or abhors anything, no matter how
slightly, for that thing to acquire a proportionate value
which no chorus of contradiction ringing through all the
spheres can ever wholly abolish. An experience good or
bad in itself remains so for ever, and its inclusion in a more
general order of things can only change that totality pro
portionately to the ingredient absorbed, which will infect
the mass, so far as it goes, with its own colour. The more
pleasure a universe can yield, other things being equal,
the more beneficent and generous is its general nature ;
the more pains its constitution involves, the darker and
more malign is its total temper. To deny this would seem
impossible, yet it is done daily ; for there is nothing people
will not maintain when they are slaves to superstition ;
and candour and a sense of justice are, in such a case, the
first things lost.

100

THE VOLUPTUARY AND THE WORLDLING

WORLDLY minds bristle with conventional morality (though
in private they may nurse a vice or two to appease way
ward nature), and they are rational in everything except
first principles. They consider the voluptuary a weak
fool, disgraced and disreputable ; and if they notice the
spiritual man at all for he is easily ignored they regard
him as a useless and visionary fellow. Civilization has to
work algebraically with symbols for known and unknown
quantities which only in the end resume their concrete
values, so that the journeymen and vulgar middlemen of
the world know only conventional goods. They are lost
in instrumentalities and are themselves only instruments
in the life of reason. Wealth, station, fame, success of
some notorious and outward sort, make their standard of
happiness. Their chosen virtues are industry, good sense,
probity, conventional piety, and whatever else has acknow
ledged utility and seemliness.

In its strictures on pleasure and reverie this Philistia is
perfectly right. Sensuous living (and I do not mean

THE VOLUPTUARY AND THE WORLDLING 253

debauchery alone, but the palpitations of any poet without
art or any mystic without discipline) is not only inconse
quential and shallow, but dangerous to honour and to
sincere happiness. When life remains lost in sense or
reverts to it entirely, humanity itself is atrophied. And
humanity is tormented and spoilt when, as more often
happens, a man disbelieving in reason and out of humour
with his world, abandons his soul to loose whimsies and
passions that play a quarrelsome game there, like so
many ill-bred children. Nevertheless, compared with the
worldling s mental mechanism and rhetoric, the sensual
ist s soul is a well of wisdom. He lives naturally on
an animal level and attains a kind of good. He has free
and concrete pursuits, though they be momentary, and
he has sincere satisfactions. He is less often corrupt than
primitive, and even when corrupt he finds some justifica
tion for his captious existence. He harvests pleasures
as he goes which, taken intrinsically, may have the depth
and ideality which nature breathes in all her oracles. His
experience, for that reason, though disastrous is interesting
and has some human pathos ; it is easier to make a saint
out of a libertine than out of a prig. True, the libertine
is pursued, like the animals, by unforeseen tortures, decay,
and abandonment, and he is vowed to a total death ; but
in these respects the worldly man has hardly an advantage.
The Babels he piles up may indeed survive his person,
but they are themselves vain and without issue, while his
brief life has been meantime spent in slavery and his
mind cramped with cant and foolish ambitions. The
voluptuary is like some roving creature, browsing on
nettles and living by chance ; the worldling is like a beast
of burden, now ill-used and overworked, now fatted,
stalled, and richly caparisoned. ^Esop might well have
described their relative happiness in a fable about the
wild ass and the mule.

Thus, even if the voluptuary is sometimes a poet and
the worldling often an honest man, they both lack reason
so entirely that reflection revolts equally against the life
of both. Vanity, vanity, is their common epitaph. Now,
at the soul s christening and initiation into the life of
reason, the first vow must always be to " renounce the

254 LITTLE ESSAYS

pomps and vanities of this wicked world." A person to
whom this means nothing is one to whom, in the end,
nothing has meaning. He has not conceived a highest
good, no ultimate goal is within his horizon, and it has
never occurred to him to ask what he is living for. With
all his pompous soberness, the worldly man is funda
mentally frivolous ; with all his maxims and cant estima
tions he is radically inane. He conforms to religion without
suspecting what religion means, not being in the least
open to such an inquiry. He judges art like a parrot,
without having ever stopped to evoke an image. He
preaches about service and duty without any recognition
of natural demands or any standard of betterment. His
moral life is one vast anacoluthon in which the final term
is left out that might have given sense to the whole, one
vast ellipsis in which custom seems to bridge the chasm left
between ideas. He denies the values of sense because
they tempt to truancies from mechanical activity ; the
values of reason he necessarily ignores because they lie
beyond his scope. He adheres to conventional maxims
and material quantitative standards ; his production is
therefore, as far as he himself is concerned, an essential
waste and his activity an essential tedium. If at least,
like the sensualist, he enjoyed the process and expressed
his fancy in his life, there would be something gained ; and
this sort of gain, though overlooked in the worldling s
maxims, all of which have a categorical tone, is really
what often lends his life some propriety and spirit. Busi
ness and war and any customary task may come to form,
so to speak, an organ whose natural function will be just
that operation, and the most abstract and secondary
activity, like that of adding figures or reading advertise
ments, may in this way become the one function proper
to some soul. There are Nibelungen dwelling by choice
underground and happy pedants in the upper air.

Facts are not wanting for these pillars of society to
take solace in, if they wish to defend their philosophy.
The time will come, astronomers say, when life will be
extinct upon this weary planet. All the delights of sense
and imagination will be over. It is these that will have
turned out to be vain. But the masses of matter which

THE VOLUPTUARY AND THE WORLDLING 255

the worldlings have transformed with their machinery,
and carried from one place to another, will remain to bear
witness of them. The collocation of atoms will never be
what it would have been if their feet had less continually
beaten the earth. They may have the proud happiness of
knowing that, when nothing that the spirit values endures,
the earth may still sometimes, because of them, cast a
slightly different shadow across the craters of the moon.

The sensualist at least is not worldly, and though his
nature be atrophied in all its higher part, there is not
lacking, as we have seen, a certain internal and abstract
spirituality in his experience. He is a sort of sprightly
and incidental mystic, treating his varied succession of
little worlds as the mystic does his monotonous universe.
Sense, moreover, is capable of many refinements, by which
physical existence becomes its own reward. In the
disciplined play of fancy which the fine arts afford, the
mind s free action justifies itself and becomes intrinsically
delightful. Science not only exercises in itself the intel
lectual powers, but assimilates nature to the mind, so that
all things may nourish it. In love and friendship the
liberal life extends also to the heart. All these interests,
which justify themselves by their intrinsic fruits, make
so many rational episodes and patches in conventional
life ; but it must be confessed in all candour that these
are but oases in the desert, and that as the springs of life
are irrational, so its most vehement and prevalent interests
remain irrational to the end. When the pleasures of sense
and art, of knowledge and sympathy, are stretched to the
utmost, what part will they cover and justify of our
passions, our industry, our governments, our religion ?

101

MORAL WAR

IN moral reprobation there is often a fanatical element, I
mean that hatred which an animal may sometimes feel
for other animals on account of their strange aspect, or
because their habits put him to serious inconvenience, or

256 LITTLE ESSAYS

because these habits, if he himself adopted them, might be
vicious in him. Such aversion, however, is not a rational
sentiment. No fault can be justly found with a creature
merely for not resembling another, or for flourishing in a
different physical or moral environment. It has been an
unfortunate consequence of mythical philosophies that
moral emotions have been stretched to objects with which
a man has only physical relations, so that the universe has
been filled with monsters more or less horrible, according
as the forces they represented were more or less formidable
to human life. In the same spirit, every experiment in
civilization has passed for a crime among those engaged
in some other experiment. The foreigner has seemed an
insidious rascal, the heretic a pestilent sinner, and any
material obstacle a literal devil ; while to possess some
unusual passion, however innocent, has brought obloquy on
every one unfortunate enough not to be constituted like
the average of his neighbours. The physical repulsion, how
ever, which everybody feels to habits and interests which
he is incapable of sharing, is no part of rational estima
tion, large as its share may be in the fierce prejudices and
superstitions which pre-rational morality abounds in. The
strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral
feelings at all ; they express merely physical antipathies.

Toward alien powers a man s true weapon is not
invective, but skill and strength. An obstacle is an
obstacle, not a devil ; and even a moral life, when it actually
exists in a being with hostile activities, is merely a hostile
power. It is not hostile, however, in so far as it is moral,
but only in so far as its morality represents a material
organism, physically incompatible with what the thinker
has at heart.

Material conflicts cannot be abolished by reason, because
reason is powerful only where they have been removed.
Yet where opposing forces are able mutually to comprehend
and respect one another, common ideal interests at once
supervene, and though the material conflict may remain
irrepressible, it will be overlaid by an intellectual life,
partly common and unanimous. In this lies the chivalry
of war, that we acknowledge the right of others to pursue
ends contrary to our own. Competitors who are able to

MORAL WAR 257

feel this ideal comity, and who leading different lives in
the flesh lead the same life in imagination, are incited
by their mutual understanding to rise above that material
ambition, perhaps gratuitous, that has made them enemies.
They may ultimately wish to renounce that temporal good
which deprives them of spiritual goods in truth infinitely
greater and more appealing to the soul innocence, justice,
and intelligence. They may prefer an enlarged mind to
enlarged frontiers, and the comprehension of things foreign
to the destruction of them. They may even aspire to detach
ment from those private interests which, as Plato said, do not
deserve to be taken too seriously ; the fact that we must
take them seriously being the ignoble part of our condition.

Of course such renunciations, to be rational, must not
extend to the whole material basis of life, since some
physical particularity and efficiency are requisite for
bringing into being that very rationality which is to turn
enemies into friends. The need of a material basis for
spirit is what renders partial war with parts of the world
the inevitable background of charity and justice. The
frontiers at which this warfare is waged may, however,
be pushed back indefinitely. Within the sphere organized
about a firm and generous life a Roman peace can be
established. It is not what is assimilated that saps a
creative will, but what remains outside that ultimately
invades and disrupts it. In exact proportion to its vigour,
it wins over former enemies, civilizes the barbarian, and
even tames the viper, when the eye is masterful and sym
pathetic enough to dispel hatred and fear. The more
rational an institution is the less it suffers by making con
cessions to others ; for these concessions, being just,
propagate its essence. The ideal commonwealth can
extend to the limit at which such concessions cease to
be just and are thereby detrimental. Beyond or below
that limit strife must continue for physical ascendancy,
so that the power and the will to be reasonable may not be
undermined. Reason is an operation in nature, and has
its root there. Saints cannot arise where there have been
no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does
not remain hidden in the depths.

Perhaps the art of politics, if it were practised scientific-

s

258 LITTLE ESSAYS

ally, might obviate open war, religious enmities, industrial
competition, and human slavery ; but it would certainly
not leave a free field for all animals nor for all monstrosities
in men. Even while admitting the claims of monsters to
be treated humanely, reason could not suffer them to absorb
those material resources which might be needed to main
tain rational society at its highest efficiency. We cannot,
at this immense distance from a rational social order,
judge what concessions individual genius would be called
upon to make in a system of education and government
in which all attainable goods should be pursued scientifically.
Concessions would certainly be demanded, if not from
well-trained wills, still from inevitable instincts, reacting
on inevitable accidents. There is tragedy in perfection,
because the universe in which perfection arises is itself
imperfect. Accidents will always continue to harass the
most consummate organism ; they will flow in both from the
outer world and from the interstices, so to speak, of its
own machinery ; for a rational life touches the irrational
at its core as well as at its periphery. In both directions
it meets physical force and can subsist only by exercising
physical force in return. The range of rational ethics is
limited to the intermediate political zone, in which exist
ences have attained some degree of natural unanimity.

It should be added, perhaps, that the frontiers between
moral and physical action are purely notional. Real
existences do not lie wholly on one or the other side of
them. Every man, every material object, has moral
affinities enveloping an indomitable vital nucleus or brute
personal kernel ; this moral essence is enveloped in turn
by untraceable relations, radiating to infinity over the
natural world. The stars enter society by the light and
knowledge they afford, the time they keep, and the orna
ment they lavish ; but they are mere dead weights in their
substance and cosmological puzzles in their destiny. You
and I possess manifold ideal bonds in the interests we
share ; but each of us has his poor body and his irremedi
able, incommunicable dreams. Beyond the little span of
his foresigth and love, each is merely a physical agency,
preparing the way quite irresponsibly for undreamt-of
revolutions and alien lives.

ORIGIN OF TYRANNY 259

102

ORIGIN OF TYRANNY

THE inertia s which physics registers in the first law of
motion, natural history and psychology call habit. In
society it takes the form of custom, which when codified
is called law and when enforced is called government.
Government is the political representative of a natural
equilibrium, of custom, of inertia ; it is by no means a
representative of reason. But like any mechanical com
plication it may become rational, and many of its forms
and operations may be defended on rational grounds.

Suppose a cold and hungry savage, failing to find berries
and game enough in the woods, should descend into some
meadow where a flock of sheep were grazing and pounce
upon a lame lamb which could not run away with the
others, tear its flesh, suck up its blood, and dress himself
in its skin. All this could not be called an affair under
taken in the sheep s interest. And yet it might well
conduce to their interest in the end. For the savage,
finding himself soon hungry again, and insufficiently warm
in that scanty garment, might attack the flock a second
time, and thereby begin to accustom himself, and also
his delighted family, to a new and more substantial sort
of raiment and diet. Suppose, now, a pack of wolves,
or a second savage, or a disease should attack those unhappy
sheep. Would not their primeval enemy defend them ?
Would he not have identified himself with their interests
to this extent, that their total extinction or discomfiture
would alarm him also ? And in so far as he provided for
their well-being, would he not have become a good shepherd?
If, now, some philosophic wether, a lover of his kind,
reasoned with his fellows upon the change in their con
dition, he might shudder indeed at those early episodes
and at the contribution of lambs and fleeces which would
not cease to be levied by the new government ; but he
might also consider that such a contribution was nothing
in comparison with what was formerly exacted by wolves,
diseases, frosts, and casual robbers, when the flock was

260 LITTLE ESSAYS

much smaller than it had now grown to be, and much less
able to withstand decimation. And he might even have
conceived an admiration for the remarkable wisdom and
beauty of that great shepherd, dressed in such a wealth
of wool ; and he might remember pleasantly some occa
sional caress received from him and the daily trough
filled with water by his providential hand. And he might
not be far from maintaining not only the rational origin,
but the divine right of shepherds.

Such a savage enemy, incidentally turned into a useful
master, is called a conqueror or king. His government is
nothing but a chronic raid, mitigated by the desire to
leave the inhabitants prosperous enough to be continually
despoiled afresh. At first an army is simply a ravenous
and lusty horde quartered in a conquered country ; yet the
cost of such an incubus may come to be regarded as an
insurance against further attack, and so what is in its
real basis an inevitable burden resulting from a chance
balance of forces may be justified in after-thought as a
rational device for defensive purposes. Such an ulterior
justification has nothing to do, however, with the causes
that maintain armies or military policies : and accordingly
those virginal minds that think things originated in the
uses they may have acquired, have frequent cause to be
pained and perplexed at the abuses and over-development
of militarism. The constant compensation tyranny brings,
which keeps it from at once exhausting its victims, is the
silence it imposes on their private squabbles. One distant
universal enemy may be less oppressive than a thousand
unchecked pilferers and plotters at home.

103
WAR

To fight is a radical instinct ; if men have nothing else to
fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women,
or they will fight because they dislike each other s looks, or
because they have met walking in opposite directions.
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an

WAR 261

arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood. To fight
for a reason and in a calculating spirit is something your
true warrior despises ; even a coward might screw his
courage up to such a reasonable conflict. The joy and
glory of fighting lie in its pure spontaneity and consequent
generosity ; you are not fighting for gain, but for sport and
for victory. Victory, no doubt, has its fruits for the victor.
If fighting were not a possible means of livelihood the
bellicose instinct could never have established itself in
any long-lived race. A few men can live on plunder, just
as there is room in the world for some beasts of prey ;
other men are reduced to living on industry, just as there
are diligent bees, ants, and herbivorous kine. But victory
need have no good fruits for the people whose army
is victorious. That it sometimes does so is an ulterior
and blessed circumstance hardly to be reckoned upon.

Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its
apologists. There are panegyrists of war who say that
without a periodical bleeding a race decays and loses its
manhood. Experience is directly opposed to this shameless
assertion. It is war that wastes a nation s wealth, chokes
its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies,
condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the
puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.
Internecine war, foreign and civil, brought about the greatest
set-back which the life of reason has ever suffered ; it
exterminated the Greek and Italian aristocracies. Instead
of being descended from heroes, modern nations are
descended from slaves ; and it is not their bodies only
that show it. After a long peace, if the conditions of life
are propitious, we observe a people s energies bursting
their barriers ; they become aggressive on the strength
they have stored up in their remote and unchecked develop
ment. It is the unmutilated race, fresh from the struggle
with nature (in which the best survive, while in war it is
often the best that perish), that descends victoriously into
the arena of nations and conquers disciplined armies at
the first blow, becomes the military aristocracy of the next
epoch and is itself ultimately sapped and decimated by
luxury and battle, and merged at last into the ignoble
conglomerate beneath. Then, perhaps, in some other

262 LITTLE ESSAYS

virgin country a genuine humanity is again found, capable
of victory because unbled by war. To call war the soil of
courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

Blind courage is an animal virtue indispensable in a world
full of dangers and evils where a certain insensibility and
dash are requisite to skirt the precipice without vertigo.
Such animal courage seems therefore beautiful rather than
desperate or cruel, and being the lowest and most instinctive
of virtues it is the one most widely and sincerely admired.
In the form of steadiness under risks rationally taken,
and perseverance so long as there is a chance of success,
courage is a true virtue ; but it ceases to be one when the
love of danger, a useful passion when danger is unavoidable,
begins to lead men into evils which it was unnecessary to
face. Bravado, provocativeness, and a gambler s instinct,
with a love of hitting hard for the sake of exercise, is a
temper which ought already to be counted among the
vices rather than the virtues of man. To delight in war
is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain,
and a positive crime in the statesman.

The panegyrist of war places himself on the lowest
level on which a moralist or patriot can stand and shows
as great a want of refined feeling as of right reason. For
the glories of war are all blood-stained, delirious, and
infected with crime ; the combative instinct is a savage
prompting by which one man s good is found in another s
evil. The existence of such a contradiction in the moral
world is the original sin of nature, whence flows every
other wrong. He is a willing accomplice of that perversity
in things who delights in another s discomfiture or in his
own, and craves the blind tension of plunging into danger
without reason, or the idiot s pleasure in facing a pure
chance. To find joy in another s trouble is, as man is
constituted, not unnatural, though it is wicked ; and to
find joy in one s own trouble, though it be madness, is not
yet impossible for man. These are the chaotic depths of
that dreaming nature out of which humanity has tc
grow.

PATRIOTISM 263

104
PATRIOTISM

PATRIOTISM is a form of piety. It is right to prefer our
own country to all others because we are children and
citizens before we can be travellers or philosophers.
Specific character is a necessary point of origin for universal
relations : a pure nothing can have no radiation and no
scope. It is no accident for the soul to be embodied :
her very essence is to express and bring to fruition the
functions and resources of the body. Its instincts sustain
her ideals and its relations her world. A native country
is a sort of second body, another enveloping organism to
give the will definition. A specific inheritance strengthens
the soul. Cosmopolitanism has doubtless its place, because
a man may well cultivate in himself, and represent in his
nation, affinities to other peoples, and such assimilation
to them as is compatible with personal integrity and
clearness of purpose. Plasticity to things foreign need not
be inconsistent with happiness and utility at home. But
happiness and utility are possible nowhere to a man who
represents nothing and who looks out on the world without
a plot of his own to stand on, either on earth or in heaven.
He wanders from place to place, a voluntary exile, always
querulous, always uneasy, always alone. His very criticisms
express no ideal. His experience is without sweetness,
without cumulative fruits, and his children, if he has them,
are without morality. For reason and happiness are like
other flowers they wither when plucked. On the other
hand, to be always harping on nationality is to convert
what should be a recognition of natural conditions into a
ridiculous pride in one s own oddities. Nature has hidden
the roots of things, and though botany must now and then
dig them up for the sake of comprehension, their place is
still under ground. A man s feet must be planted in his
country, but his eyes should survey the world.

Where parties and governments are bad, as they are
in most ages and countries, it makes practically no difference
to a community, apart from local ravages, whether its own

264 LITTLE ESSAYS

army or the enemy s is victorious in war, nor does it really
affect any man s welfare whether the party he happens to
belong to is in office or not. These issues concern, in such
cases, only the army itself, whose lives and fortunes are at
stake, or the official classes, who lose their places when their
leaders fall from power. The private citizen in any event
continues in such countries to pay a maximum of taxes
and to suffer, in all his private interests, a maximum of
vexation and neglect. Nevertheless, because he has some
son at the front, some cousin in the government, or some
historical sentiment for the flag and the nominal essence of
his country, the oppressed subject will glow like the rest
with patriotic ardour, and will decry as dead to duty and
honour any one who points out how perverse is this helpless
allegiance to a government representing no public interest.

In proportion as governments become good and begin
to operate for the general welfare, patriotism itself becomes
representative and an expression of reason ; but just in
the same measure does hostility to that government on the
part of foreigners become groundless and perverse. A
competitive patriotism involves ill-will toward all other
states and a secret and constant desire to see them thrashed
and subordinated. It follows that a good government,
while it justifies this governmental patriotism in its subjects,
disallows it in all other men. For a good government is
an international benefit, and the prosperity and true great
ness of any country is a boon sooner or later to the whole
world ; it may eclipse alien governments and draw away
local populations or industries, but it necessarily benefits
alien individuals in so far as it is allowed to affect them at all.

Animosity against a well-governed country is therefore
madness. A rational patriotism would rather take the
form of imitating and supporting that so-called foreign
country, and even, if practicable, of fusing with it. The
invidious and aggressive form of patriotism, though
inspired generally only by local conceit, would neverthe
less be really justified if such conceit happened to be well
grounded. A dream of universal predominance visiting
a truly virtuous and intelligent people would be an aspira
tion toward universal beneficence. For every man who
is governed at all must be governed by others ; the point

PATRIOTISM 265

is, that the others, in ruling him, shall help him to be
himself and give scope to his congenial activities. When
coerced in that direction he obeys a force which, in the
best sense of the word, represents him, and consequently
he is truly free ; nor could he be ruled by a more native
and rightful authority than by one that divines and satisfies
his true necessities.

A man s nature is not, however, a quantity or quality
fixed unalterably and a priori. As breeding and selection
improve a race, so every experience modifies the individual
and offers a changed basis for future experience. The lan
guage, religion, education, and prejudices acquired in youth
bias character and predetermine the directions in which
development may go on. A child might possibly change
his country ; a man can only wish that he might change it.
Therefore, among the true interests which a government
should represent, nationality itself must be included.

Mechanical forces, we must not weary of repeating, do
not come merely to vitiate the ideal ; they come to create
it. The historical background of life is a part of its sub
stance, and the ideal can never grow independently of its
spreading roots. A sanctity hangs about the sources of
our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary. The
ancients who kissed the earth on returning to their native
country expressed nobly and passionately what every man
feels for those regions and those traditions whence the sap
of his own life has been sucked in. There is a profound
friendliness in whatever revives primordial habits, however
they may have been overlaid with later sophistications.
For this reason the homelier words of a mother tongue,
the more familiar assurances of an ancestral religion, and
the very savour of childhood s dishes, remain always a
potent means to awaken emotion. Such ingrained in
fluences, in their vague totality, make a man s true
nationality. A government, in order to represent the
general interests of its subjects, must move in sympathy
with their habits and memories ; it must respect their
idiosyncrasy for the same reason that it protects their
lives. If parting from a single object of love be, as it is,
true dying, how much more would a shifting of all the
affections be death to the soul.

266 LITTLE ESSAYS

Man is certainly an animal that, when he lives at all,
lives for ideals. Something must be found to occupy
his imagination, to raise pleasure and pain into love
and hatred, and change the prosaic alternative between
comfort and discomfort into the tragic one between happi
ness and sorrow. Now that the hue of daily adventure is
so dull, when religion for the most part is so vague and
accommodating, when even war is a vast impersonal
business, nationality seems to have slipped into the place
of honour. It has become the one eloquent, public,
intrepid illusion. Illusion, I mean, when it is taken foi
an ultimate good or a mystical essence, for of course
nationality is a fact. People speak some particular
language and are very uncomfortable where another is
spoken or where their own is spoken differently. They
have habits, judgments, assumptions to which they are
wedded, and a society where all this is unheard of shocks
them and puts them at a galling disadvantage. To ignorant
people the foreigner as such is ridiculous, unless he is
superior to them in numbers or prestige, when he becomes
hateful. It is natural for a man to like to live at home,
and to live long elsewhere without a sense of exile is not
good for his moral integrity. It is right to feel a greater
kinship and affection for what lies nearest to oneself.
But this necessary fact and even duty of nationality is
accidental ; like age or sex it is a physical fatality which
can be made the basis of specific and comely virtues ; but
it is not an end to pursue, or a flag to flaunt, or a privilege
not balanced by a thousand incapacities. Yet of this
distinction our contemporaries tend to make an idol,
perhaps because it is the only distinction they feel they
have left.

105
INDUSTRIAL IDEALISM

A PEOPLE once having become industrial will hardly be
happy if sent back to Arcadia ; it will have formed busy
habits which it cannot relax without tedium ; it wilj have
developed a restlessness and avidity which will crave

INDUSTRIAL IDEALISM 267

matter, like any other kind of hunger. Every experiment
in living qualifies the initial possibilities of life, and the
moralist would reckon without his host if he did not allow
for the change which forced exercise makes in instinct,
adjusting it more or less to extant conditions originally,
perhaps, unwelcome. It is too late for the highest good
to prescribe flying for quadrupeds or peace for the sea
waves. Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning
of happiness.

The acceptable side of industrialism, which is supposed
to be inspired exclusively by utility, is not utility at all
but pure achievement. If we wish to do such an age
justice we must judge it as we should a child and praise
its feats without inquiring after its purposes. That is its
own spirit : a spirit dominant at the present time, particu
larly in America, where industrialism appears most free
from alloy. There is a curious delight in turning things
over, changing their shape, discovering their possibilities,
making of them some new contrivance. Use, in these
experimental minds, as in nature, is only incidental. There
is an irrational creative impulse, a zest in novelty, in pro
gression, in beating the other man, or, as they say, in break
ing the record. There is also a fascination in seeing the
world unbosom itself of ancient secrets, obey man s coaxing,
and take on unheard-of shapes. The highest building, the
largest steamer, the fastest train, the book reaching the
widest circulation have, in America, a clear title to respect.
When the just functions of things are as yet not discrimin
ated, the superlative in any direction seems naturally
admirable. Again, many possessions, if they do not make
a man better, are at least expected to make his children
happier ; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.
An experimental materialism, spontaneous and divorced
from reason and from everything useful, is also confused
in some minds with traditional duties ; and a school of
popular hierophants is not lacking that turns it into a sort
of religion and perhaps calls it idealism. Impulse is more
visible in all this than purpose, imagination more than
judgment ; but it is pleasant for the moment to abound
in invention and effort and to let the future cash the
account.

268 LITTLE ESSAYS

106
COLLECTIVISM

IDEAL patriotism is not secured when each man, although
without natural eminence, pursues his private interests.
What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that
in society he gives new aims to his life which could not
have existed in solitude : the aims of friendship, religion,
science, and art. All these aims, in a well-knit state, are
covered by the single passion of patriotism ; and then a
conception of one s country, its history and mission, becomes
the touchstone of every ideal impulse. Democracy requires
this kind of patriotism in everybody ; so that if public
duty is not to become a sacrifice imposed on the many for
the sake of the few, as in aristocracy, the reason can only
be that the many covet, appreciate, and appropriate their
country s ideal glories, quite as much as the favoured
class ever could in any aristocracy.

Is this possible ? What might happen if the human
race were immensely improved and exalted there is as yet
no saying ; but experience has given no example of effi
cacious devotion to communal ideals except in small cities,
held together by close military and religious bonds and
having no important relations to anything external. Even
this antique virtue was short-lived and sadly thwarted
by private and party passion. Where public spirit has
held best, as at Sparta or (to take a very different type of
communal passion) among the Jesuits, it has been paid
for by a notable lack of spontaneity and wisdom ; such
inhuman devotion to an arbitrary end has made these
societies odious. We may say, therefore, that a zeal
sufficient to destroy selfishness is, as men are now con
stituted, worse than selfishness itself. In pursuing prizes
for themselves people benefit their fellows more than in
pursuing such narrow and irrational ideals as alone seem
to be powerful in the world. To ambition, to the love
of wealth and honour, to love of a liberty which meant
opportunity for experiment and adventure, we owe what
ever benefits we have derived from Greece and Rome, from

COLLECTIVISM 269

Italy and England. It is doubtful whether a society
which offered no personal prizes would inspire effort ; and
it is still more doubtful whether that effort, if actually
stimulated by education, would be beneficent. For an
indoctrinated and collective virtue turns easily to fanati
cism ; it imposes irrational sacrifices prompted by some
abstract principle or habit once, perhaps, useful ; but
that convention soon becomes superstitious and ceases to
represent general human excellence.

Individualism is in one sense the only possible ideal ;
for whatever social order may be most valuable can be
valuable only for its effect on conscious individuals. Man
is, of course, a social animal and needs society, first that he
may come safely into being, and then that he may have
something interesting to do. But society itself is no animal
and has neither instincts, interests, nor ideals. To talk of
such things is either to speak metaphorically or to think
mythically ; and myths, the more currency they acquire,
pass the more easily into superstitions. It would be a gross
and pedantic superstition to venerate any form of society
in itself, apart from the safety, breadth, or sweetness which
it lent to individual happiness. If the individual may be
justly subordinated to the state, not merely for the sake of
a future freer generation, but permanently and in the ideal
society, the reason is simply that such subordination is a
part of a man s natural devotion to things rational and
impersonal, in the presence of which alone he can be per
sonally happy. Society in its future and in its past is a
natural object of interest like art or science ; it exists, like
them, because only when lost in such rational objects can
a free soul be active and immortal. But all these ideals
are terms in some actual life, not alien ends, important to
nobody, to which, notwithstanding, everybody is to be
sacrificed.

107
CHRISTIAN MORALITY

THE Jews, without dreaming of any inherent curse in being
finite, had found themselves often in the sorest material
straits. They hoped, like all primitive peoples, that relief

270 LITTLE ESSAYS

might come by propitiating the deity. They knew that
the sins of the fathers were visited upon the children even
to the third and fourth generation. They had accepted
this idea of joint responsibility and vicarious atonement,
turning in their unphilosophical way this law of nature
into a principle of justice. Meantime the failure of all
their cherished ambitions had plunged them into a peni
tential mood. Though in fact pious and virtuous to a
fault, they still looked for repentance their own or the
world s to save them. This redemption was to be ac
complished in the Hebrew spirit, through long-suffering
and devotion to the Law, with the Hebrew solidarity, by
vicarious attribution of merits and demerits within the
household of the faith.

Such a way of conceiving redemption was far more
dramatic, poignant, and individual than the Neo-Platonic ;
hence it was far more popular and better fitted to be a
nucleus for religious devotion. However much, therefore,
Christianity may have insisted on renouncing the world,
the flesh, and the devil, it always kept in the background
this perfectly Jewish and pre-rational craving for a delect
able promised land. The journey might be long and through
a desert, but milk and honey were to flow in the oasis
beyond. Had renunciation been fundamental or revulsion
from nature complete, there would have been no much-
trumpeted last judgment and no material kingdom of
heaven. The renunciation was only temporary and partial ;
the revulsion was only against incidental evils. Despair
touched nothing but the present order of the world, though
at first it took the extreme form of calling for its immediate
destruction. This was the sort of despair and renuncia
tion that lay at the bottom of Christian repentance ; while
hope in a new order of this world, or of one very like it,
lay at the bottom of Christian joy. A temporary sacrifice, it
was thought, and a partial mutilation would bring the spirit
miraculously into a fresh paradise. The pleasures nature
had grudged or punished, grace was to offer as a reward for
faith and patience. The earthly life which was vain as a
possession was to be profitable as a trial. Normal experience,
appropriate exercise for the spirit, would thereafter begin.

Christianity is thus a system of postponed rationalism,

CHRISTIAN MORALITY 271

a rationalism intercepted by a supernatural version of the
conditions of happiness. Its moral principle is reason
the only moral principle there is ; its motive power is the
impulse and natural hope to be and to be happy. Christi
anity merely renews and reinstates these universal prin
ciples after a first disappointment and a first assault of
despair, by opening up new vistas of accomplishment, new
qualities and measures of success. The Christian field of
action being a world of grace enveloping the world of
nature, many transitory reversals of acknowledged values
may take place in its code. Poverty, chastity, humility,
obedience, self-sacrifice, ignorance, sickness, and dirt may
all acquire a religious worth which reason, in its direct
application, might scarcely have found in them ; yet these
reversed appreciations are merely incidental to a secret
rationality, and are justified on the ground that human
nature, as now found, is corrupt and needs to be purged
and transformed before it can safely manifest its congenital
instincts and become again an authoritative criterion of
values. In the kingdom of God men would no longer need
to do penance, for life there would be truly natural and
there the soul would be at last in her native sphere.

This submerged optimism exists in Christianity, being
a heritage from the Jews ; and those Protestant com
munities that have rejected the pagan and Platonic elements
that overlaid it have little difficulty in restoring it to
prominence. Not, however, without abandoning the soul
of the gospel ; for the soul of the gospel, though expressed
in the language of Messianic hopes, is really post-rational.
It was not to marry and be given in marriage, or to sit on
thrones, or to unravel metaphysical mysteries, or to enjoy
any of the natural delights renounced in this life, that
Christ summoned his disciples to abandon all they had and
to follow him. There was surely a deeper peace in his
self-surrender. It was not a new thing even among the
Jews to use the worldly promises of their exoteric religion
as symbols for inner spiritual revolutions ; and the change
of heart involved in genuine Christianity was not a fresh
excitation of gaudy hopes, nor a new sort of utilitarian,
temporary austerity. It was an emptying of the will, in
respect to all human desires, so that a perfect charity and

272 LITTLE ESSAYS

contemplative justice, falling like the Father s gifts un
grudgingly on the whole creation, might take the place of
ambition, petty morality, and earthly desires. It was a
renunciation which, at least in Christ himself and in his
more spiritual disciples, did not spring from disappointed
illusion or lead to other unregenerate illusions even more
sure to be dispelled by events. It sprang rather from
a native speculative depth, a natural affinity to the divine
fecundity, serenity, and sadness of the world. It was the
spirit of prayer, the kindliness and insight which a pure
soul can fetch from contemplation.

This mystical detachment, supervening on the dogged
old Jewish optimism, gave Christianity a double aspect,
and had some curious consequences in later times. Those
who were inwardly convinced as most religious minds
were under the Roman Empire that all earthly -things
were vanity, and that they plunged the soul into an abyss
of nothingness if not of torment, could, in view of brighter
possibilities in another world, carry their asceticism and
their cult of suffering farther than a purely negative system,
like the Buddhistic, would have allowed. For a discipline
that is looked upon as merely temporary can contradict
nature more boldly than one intended to take nature s
place. The hope of unimaginable benefits to ensue could
drive religion to greater frenzies than it could have fallen
into if its object had been merely to silence the will.
Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a
hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled
wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions. It
sanctified, quite like Mohammedanism, extermination and
tyranny. All this would have been impossible if, like
Buddhism, it had looked only to peace and the liberation
of souls. It looked beyond ; it dreamt of infinite blisses
and crowns it should be crowned with before an electrified
universe and an applauding God. These were rival baits
to those which the world fishes with, and were snapped at,
when seen, with no less avidity. Man, far from being freed
from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones
quite as violent and much more disappointing. Buddhism
had tried to quiet a sick world with anaesthetics ; Christi
anity sought to purge it- with fire.

SUPERNATURALISM 273

108
SUPERNATURALISM

THE most plausible evidence which a revealed doctrine can
give of its truth is the beauty and rationality of its moral
corollaries. It is instructive to observe that the congruity
of a gospel with natural reason and common humanity is
regarded as the decisive mark of its supernatural origin.
Indeed, were inspiration not the faithful echo of plain
conscience and vulgar experience, there would be no means
of distinguishing it from madness. Whatever poetic idea
a prophet starts with, in whatever intuition or analogy he
finds a hint of salvation, it is altogether necessary that
he should hasten to interpret his oracle in such a manner
that it may sanction without disturbing the system of indis
pensable natural duties, although these natural duties, by
being attached artificially to supernatural dogmas, may
take on a different tone, justify themselves by a different
rhetoric, and possibly suffer real transformation in some
minor particulars. Systems of post-rational morality are
not original works : they are versions of natural morality
translated into different metaphysical languages, each of
which adds its peculiar flavour, its own genius and poetry,
to the plain sense of the common original.

Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made
by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes ; it is as far as
possible from being the source of that normal vitality which
subsequently, if his fortunes mend, he may gradually
recover. Under the same religion, with the same post
humous alternatives and mystic harmonies hanging about
them, different races, or the same race at different periods,
will manifest the most opposite moral characteristics.
Belief in a thousand hells and heavens will not lift the
apathetic out of apathy or hold back the passionate from
passion ; while a newly planted and ungalled community,
in blessed forgetfulness of rewards or punishments, of
cosmic needs or celestial sanctions, will know how to live
cheerily and virtuously for life s own sake, putting to shame
those thin vaticinations. To hope for a second life, to be

274 LITTLE ESSAYS

had gratis, merely because the present life has lost its
savour, or to dream of a different world, because nature
seems too intricate and unfriendly, is in the end merely
to play with words ; since the supernatural has no per
manent aspect or charm except in so far as it expresses
man s earthly situation and points to the satisfaction of
his natural interests. What keeps supernatural morality,
in its better forms, within the limits of sanity is the fact
that it reinstates in practice, under novel associations and
for motives ostensibly different, the very natural virtues
and hopes which, when seen to be merely natural, it had
thrown over with contempt. The new dispensation itself,
if treated in the same spirit, would be no less contemptible ;
and what makes it genuinely esteemed is the restored
authority of those human ideals which it expresses in a
fable.

The extent of this moral restoration, the measure in
which nature is suffered to bloom in the sanctuary,
determines the value of post-rational moralities. They
may preside over a good life, personal or communal, when
their symbolism, though cumbrous, is not deceptive ;
when the supernatural machinery brings man back to
nature through mystical circumlocutions. The peculiar
accent and emphasis which it will not cease to impose
on the obvious lessons of life need not then repel the
wisest intelligence. True sages and true civilizations can
accordingly flourish under a dispensation nominally super
natural ; for that supernaturalism may have become a
mere form in which imagination clothes a rational and
humane wisdom.

People who speak only one language have some difficulty
in conceiving that things should be expressed just as well
in some other ; a prejudice which does not necessarily
involve their mistaking words for things or being practically
misled by their inflexible vocabulary. So it constantly
happens that supernatural systems, when they have long
prevailed, are defended by persons who have only natural
interests at heart ; because these persons lack that
speculative freedom and dramatic imagination which would
allow them to conceive other moulds for morality and
happiness than those to which a respectable tradition has

SUPERNATURALISM 275

accustomed them. Sceptical statesmen and academic
scholars sometimes suffer from this kind of numbness ;
it is intelligible that they should mistake the forms of
culture for its principle, especially when their genius is
not original and their chosen function is to defend and
propagate the local traditions in which their whole training
has immersed them. Indeed, in the political field, such
concern for decaying myths may have a pathetic justifica
tion ; for however little the life or dignity of man may be
jeopardized by changes in language, languages themselves
are not indifferent things. They may be closely bound up
with the peculiar history and spirit of nations, and their dis
appearance, however necessary and on the whole propitious,
may mark the end of some stirring chapter in the world s
history. Those whose vocation is not philosophy and
whose country is not the world may be pardoned for
wishing to retard the migrations of spirit, and for looking
forward with apprehension to a future in which their
private enthusiasms will not be understood.

The value of post-rational morality, then, depends on a
double conformity on its part with the life of reason. In
the first place some natural impulse must be retained,
some partial ideal must still be trusted and pursued by the
prophet of redemption. In the second place the intuition
thus gained and exclusively put forward must be made
the starting-point for a restored natural morality. Other
wise the faith appealed to would be worthless in its opera
tion, as well as fanciful in its basis, and it could never
become a mould for thought or action in a civilized society.

109
POST-RATIONAL MORALITY

PESSIMISM, and all the moralities founded on despair, are
post-rational. They are the work of men who more or less
explicitly have conceived the life of reason, tried it at
least imaginatively, and found it wanting. These systems
are a refuge from an intolerable situation : they are ex
periments in redemption. As a matter of fact, animal

T2

276 LITTLE ESSAYS

instincts and natural standards of excellence are never
eluded in them, for no moral experience has other terms ;
but the part of the natural ideal which remains active
appears in opposition to all the rest and, by an intelligible
illusion, seems to be no part of that natural ideal because,
compared with the commoner passions on which it reacts,
it represents some simpler or more attenuated hope the
appeal to some very humble or very much chastened
satisfaction, or to an utter change in the conditions of life.

Post-rational morality thus constitutes, in intention
if not in fact, a criticism of all experience. It thinks it
does not make, like pre-rational morality, an arbitrary
selection from among co-ordinate precepts. It is an
effort to subordinate all precepts to one, that points to
some single eventual good. For it occurs to the founders of
these systems that by estranging oneself from the world,
or resting in the moment s pleasure, or mortifying the
passions, or enduring all sufferings in patience, or studying
a perfect conformity with the course of affairs, one may
gain admission to some sort of residual mystical paradise ;
and this thought, once conceived, is published as a revela
tion and accepted as a panacea. It becomes in consequence
(for such is the force of nature) the foundation of elaborate
institutions and elaborate philosophies, into which the
contents of the worldly life are gradually reintroduced.

When human life is in an acute crisis, the sick dreams
that visit the soul are the only evidence of her continued
existence. Through them she still envisages a good ; and
when the delirium passes and the normal world gradually
re-establishes itself in her regard, she attributes her
regeneration to the ministry of those phantoms, a regenera
tion due, in truth, to the restored nutrition and circulation
within her. In this way post-rational systems, though
founded originally on despair, in a later age that has
forgotten its disillusions may come to pose as the only
possible basis of morality. The philosophers addicted to
each sect, and brought up under its influence, may exhaust
criticism and sophistry to show that all faith and effort
would be vain unless their particular nostrum was accepted ;
and so a curious party philosophy arises in which, after
discrediting nature and reason in general, the sectary

POST-RATIONAL MORALITY 277

puts forward some mythical echo of reason and nature as
the one saving and necessary truth. The positive substance
of such a doctrine is accordingly pre-rational and perhaps
crudely superstitious ; but it is introduced and nominally
supported by a formidable indictment of physical and
moral science, so that the wretched idol ultimately offered
to our worship acquires a spurious halo and an imputed
majesty by being raised on a pedestal of infinite despair.

no
THE NEED OF DISCIPLINE

THERE are a myriad conflicts in practice and in thought,
conflicts between rival possibilities, knocking inopportunely
and in vain at the door of existence. Owing to the initial
disorganization of things, some demands continually
prove to be incompatible with others arising no less
naturally. Reason in such cases imposes real and irrepar
able sacrifices, but it brings a stable consolation if its
discipline is accepted. Decay, for instance, is a moral and
aesthetic evil ; but being a natural necessity it can become
the basis for pathetic and magnificent harmonies, when
once imagination is adjusted to it. The hatred of change
and death is ineradicable while life lasts, since it expresses
that self-sustaining organization in a creature which we
call its soul ; yet this hatred of change and death is not
so deeply seated in the nature of things as are death and
change themselves, for the flux is deeper than the ideal.
Discipline may attune our higher and more adaptable part
to the harsh conditions of existence, and the resulting
sentiment, being the only one which can be maintained
successfully, will express the greatest satisfactions which
can be reached, though not the greatest that might be
conceived or desired. To be interested in the changing
seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind
than to be hopelessly in love with spring. Wisdom
discovers these possible accommodations, as circumstances
impose them ; and education ought to prepare men to
accept them.

278 LITTLE ESSAYS

It is for want of education and discipline that a man
so often insists petulantly on his random tastes, instead of
cultivating those which might find some satisfaction in the
world and might produce in him some pertinent culture.
Untutored self-assertion may even lead him to deny some
fact that should have been patent, and plunge him into
needless calamity. His Utopias cheat him in the end,
if indeed the barbarous taste he has indulged in clinging
to them does not itself lapse before the dream is half
formed. So men have feverishly conceived a heaven only
to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous. Theodicies
that were to demonstrate an absolute cosmic harmony
have turned the universe into a tyrannous nightmare,
from which we are glad to awake again in this unintentional
and somewhat tractable world. Thus the fancies of
effeminate poets in violating science are false to the highest
art, and the products of sheer confusion, instigated by the
love of beauty, turn out to be hideous. A rational severity
in respect to art simply weeds the garden ; it expresses
a mature aesthetic choice and opens the way to supreme
artistic achievements. To keep beauty in its place is to
make all things beautiful.

in
HAPPINESS

IF pleasure, because it is commonly a result of satisfied
instinct, may by a figure of speech be called the aim of
impulse, happiness, by a like figure, may be called the aim
of reason. The direct aim of reason is harmony ; yet
harmony, when made to rule in life, gives reason a noble
satisfaction which we call happiness. Happiness is im
possible and even inconceivable to a mind without scope
and without pause, a mind driven by craving, pleasure,
and fear. The moralists who speak disparagingly of
happiness are less sublime than they think. In truth
their philosophy is too lightly ballasted, too much fed on
prejudice and quibbles, for happiness to fall within its
range. Happiness implies resource and security ; it can
be achieved only by discipline. Your intuitive moralist

HAPPINESS 279

rejects discipline, at least discipline of the conscience ;
and he is punished by having no lien on wisdom. He
trusts to the clash of blind forces in collision, being one of
them himself. He demands that virtue should be partisan
and unjust ; and he dreams of crushing the adversary in
some physical cataclysm.

Such groping enthusiasm is often innocent and ro
mantic ; it captivates us with its youthful spell. But
it has no structure with which to resist the shocks of
fortune, which it goes out so jauntily to meet. It turns
only too often into vulgarity and worldliness. A snow-
flake is soon a smudge, and there is a deeper purity in the
diamond. Happiness is hidden from a free and casual will ;
it belongs rather to one chastened by a long education and
unfolded in an atmosphere of sacred and perfected institu
tions. It is discipline that renders men rational and
capable of happiness, by suppressing without hatred what
needs to be suppressed to attain a beautiful naturalness.
Discipline discredits the random pleasures of illusion,
hope, and triumph, and substitutes those which are self-
reproductive, perennial, and serene, because they express
an equilibrium maintained with reality. So long as the
result of endeavour is partly unforeseen and unintentional,
so long as the will is partly blind, the life of reason is
still swaddled in ignominy and the animal barks in the
midst of human discourse. Wisdom and happiness consist
in having recast natural energies in the furnace of experi
ence. Nor has this experience merely a repressive force.
It enshrines the successful expressions of spirit as well
as the shocks and vetoes of circumstance ; it enables a
man to know himself in knowing the world and to dis
cover his ideal by the very ring, true or false, of fortune s
coin.

It seldom occurs to modern moralists that theirs is the
science of all good, and the art of attaining it ; they think
only of some set of categorical precepts or some theory of
moral sentiments, abstracting altogether from the ideals
reigning in society, in science, and in art. They deal with
the secondary question, What ought I to do ? without
having answered the primary question, What ought to be ?
They attach morals to religion rather than to politics, and

280 LITTLE ESSAYS

this religion unhappily long ago ceased to be wisdom
expressed in fancy in order to become superstition overlaid
with reasoning. The basis is laid in authority rather than
in human nature, and the goal in salvation rather than in
happiness.

It is in the nature of things that those who are incapable
of happiness should have no idea of it. Happiness is not
for wild animals, who can only oscillate between apathy
and passion. To be happy, even to conceive happiness,
you must be reasonable or (if Nietzsche prefers the word),
you must be tamed. You must have taken the measure of
your powers, tasted the fruits of your passions, and learned
your place in the world and what things in it can really
serve you. To be happy you must be wise. This happiness
is sometimes found instinctively, and then the rudest
fanatic can hardly fail to see how lovely it is ; but some
times it comes of having learned something by experience
(which empirical people never do) and involves some
chastening and renunciation ; but it is not less sweet for
having this touch of holiness about it, and the spirit of it
is healthy and beneficent. The nature of happiness,
therefore, dawns upon philosophers when their wisdom
begins to report the lessons of experience ; an a priori
philosophy can have no inkling of it.

112
DETACHMENT

WE commonly become philosophers only after despairing
of instinctive happiness, yet there is nothing impossible
in the attainment of detachment through other channels.
The immense is sublime as well as the terrible ; and mere
infinity of the object, like its hostile nature, can have the
effect of making the mind recoil upon itself. Infinity,
like hostility, removes us from things, and makes us con
scious of our independence. The simultaneous view of
many things, innumerable attractions felt together, produce
equilibrium and indifference. Let an infinite panorama
be suddenly unfolded ; the will is instantly paralysed, and

DETACHMENT 281

the heart choked. It is impossible to desire everything
at once, and when all is offered and approved, it is impossible
to choose everything. In this suspense, the mind soars
into a kind of heaven, benevolent but unmoved.

This is the attitude of all minds to which breadth of
interest or length of years has brought balance and dignity.
The sacerdotal quality of old age comes from this same
sympathy in disinterestedness. Old men full of hurry
and passion appear as fools, because we understand that
their experience has not left enough mark upon their
brain to qualify with the memory of other goods any
object that may be now presented. We cannot venerate
any one in whom appreciation is not divorced from desire.
And this elevation and detachment of the heart need not
follow upon any great disappointment ; it is finest and
sweetest where it is the gradual fruit of many affections
now merged and mellowed into a natural piety. Indeed,
we are able to frame our idea of the Deity on no other
model.

While in contemplating the beautiful we find the per
fection of life in our harmony with the object, in contem
plating the sublime we find a purer and more inalienable
perfection by defying all such harmony. The surprised
enlargement of vision, the sudden escape from our ordinary
interests and the identification of ourselves with some
thing permanent and superhuman, something much more
abstract and inalienable than our changing personality,
all this carries us away from the private tragedies before
us, and raises us into a sort of ecstasy. We escape from
ourselves altogether, and live as it were in the object,
energizing in imitation of its movement, and saying, " Be
thou me, impetuous one 1 " This passage into what
comes before us, to live its life, is indeed a characteristic
of all perfect contemplation. But when in thus translating
ourselves we rise and play a higher personage, feeling
the exhilaration of a life freer and wilder than our own,
then the experience is one of sublimity. The emotion
comes not from the accidents we endure, but from the
powers we conceive ; we fail to sympathize with the
struggling sailors because we sympathize too much with
the wind and waves. And this mystical cruelty can

282 LITTLE ESSAYS

extend even to ourselves ; we can so feel the fascination
of the cosmic forces that engulf us as to take a fierce joy
in the thought of our own destruction. We can identify
ourselves with the abstractest essence of reality, and, raised
to that height, despise the human accidents of our own
nature. Lord, we say, though thou slay me, yet will I
trust in thee. The sense of suffering disappears in the
sense of life and the imagination overwhelms the under
standing.

If we could count the stars, we should not weep before
them. While we think we can change the drama of
history, and of our own lives, we are not awed by our
destiny. But when the evil is irreparable, when our life
is lived, a strong spirit has the sublime resource of standing
at bay and of surveying almost from the other world the
vicissitudes of this.

THE PROFIT OF LIVING

IF we attempt to remove from life all its evils, as the
popular imagination has done at times, we shall find little
but aesthetic pleasures remaining to constitute unalloyed
happiness. The satisfactions of passion and appetite, in
which we chiefly place earthly happiness, themselves
take on an aesthetic tinge when we remove ideally the
possibility of loss or variation. What could the Olympians
honour in one another or the seraphim worship in God
except the embodiment of eternal attributes, of essences
which, like beauty, make us happy only in contemplation ?
The glory of heaven could not be otherwise symbolized
than by light and music. Even the knowledge of truth,
which the most sober theologians made the essence of
the beatific vision, is an aesthetic delight ; for when know
ledge of the truth has no further practical utility, the
truth becomes a landscape. The delight in it is imaginative
and the value of it aesthetic.

This reduction of all values to immediate appreciations,
to sensuous or vital activities, has struck even the minds
most stubbornly moralistic. Only for them, instead of

THE PROFIT OF LIVING 283

leading to the liberation of aesthetic goods from practical
entanglements and their establishment as the only pure
and positive values in life, this analysis has led rather
to the denial of all pure and positive goods altogether.
Such thinkers naturally assume that moral values are
intrinsic and supreme ; and since many of these moral
values would not arise but for the existence or imminence
of physical evils, they embrace the paradox that without
evil no good whatever is conceivable.

The harsh requirements of apologetics have no doubt
helped them to this position, from which one breath of
spring or the sight of one well-begotten creature should
be enough to dislodge them. Their ethical temper and
the fetters of their servile imagination forbid them to
reconsider their original assumption and to conceive that
morality is a means and not an end ; that it is the price
of human non-adaptation, and the consequence of the
original sin of unfitness. It is the art of compressing
human conduct within the narrow limits of the safe and
possible. Remove danger, remove pain, remove the occa
sion of pity, and the need of morality is gone. To say
" thou shalt not " would then be an impertinence.

But this elimination of precept would not be a cessation
of life. The senses would still be open, the instincts would
still operate, and lead all creatures to the haunts and
occupations that befitted them. The variety of nature and
the infinity of art, with the companionship of our fellows,
would fill the leisure of that ideal existence. These are
the elements of our positive happiness, the things which,
amid a thousand vexations and vanities, make the clear
profit of living.

The odious circumstances which make the attainment
of many goods conditional on the perpetration of some
evil, and which punish every virtue by some incapacity
or some abuse, these odious circumstances cannot rob
any good of its natural sweetness, nor all goods together
of their conceptual harmony. To the heart that has
felt it and that is the true judge, every loss is irretrievable
and every joy indestructible.

When we attain perfection of function we lose con
sciousness of the medium, to become more clearly conscious

284 LITTLE ESSAYS

of the result. The eye that does its duty gives no report
of itself and has no sense of muscular tension or weariness ;
but it gives all the brighter and steadier image of the
object seen. Consciousness is not lost when focussed,
and the labour of vision is abolished in its fruition. So the
musician, could he play so divinely as to be unconscious
of his body, his instrument, and the very lapse of time,
would be only the more absorbed in the harmony, more
completely master of its unities and beauty. At such
moments the body s long labour at last brings forth the
soul. Life from its inception is simply some partial
natural harmony raising its voice and bearing witness to
its own existence ; to perfect that harmony is to round
out and intensify that life. This is the very secret of
power, of joy, of intelligence. Not to have understood
it is to have passed through life without understanding
anything.

The perfection thus revealed is relative to our nature
and faculties ; if it were not, it could have no value for us.
It is revealed to us in brief moments, but it is not for that
reason an unstable or fantastic thing. Human attention
inevitably flickers ; we survey things in succession, and
our acts of synthesis and our realization of fact are only
occasional. This is the tenure of all our possessions ; we
are not uninterruptedly conscious of ourselves, our physical
environment, our ruling passions, or our deepest conviction.
What wonder, then, that we are not constantly conscious
of that perfection which is the implicit ideal of all our
preferences and desires ? We view it only in parts, as
passion or perception successively directs our attention to
its various elements. Some of us never try to conceive
it in its totality. Yet our whole life is an act of worship
to this unknown divinity ; every heartfelt prayer is offered
before one or another of its images.

This ideal of perfection varies, indeed, but only with
the variations of our nature of which it is the counterpart
and entelechy. There is perhaps no more frivolous notion
than that a good, once attained, loses all its value. The
instability of our attention, the need of rest and repair
in our organs, makes a round of objects necessary to our
minds ; but we turn from a beautiful thing, as from a

THE PROFIT OF LIVING 285

truth or a friend, only to return incessantly, and with
increasing appreciation. Nor do we lose all the benefit
of our achievements in the intervals between our vivid
realizations of what we have gained. The tone of the
mind is permanently raised ; and we live with that general
sense of steadfastness and resource, which is perhaps the
kernel of happiness. Knowledge, affection, religion, and
beauty are not less constant influences in a man s life
because his consciousness of them is intermittent. Even
when absent, they fill the chambers of the mind with a
kind of fragrance. They have a continual efficacy, as
well as a perennial worth.

114
BEAUTY A HINT OF HAPPINESS

BEAUTY as we feel it is something indescribable : what
it is or what it means can never be said. It is an affection
of the soul, a consciousness of joy and security, a pang, a
dream, a pure pleasure. It suffuses an object without
telling why ; nor has it any need to ask the question. It
justifies itself and the vision it gilds ; nor is there any
meaning in seeking for a cause of it, in this inward sense.
Beauty exists for the same reason that the object which
is beautiful exists, or the world in which that object lies,
or we that look upon both. It is an experience : there
is nothing more to say about it. Indeed, if we look at
things teleologically, and as they ultimately justify them
selves to the heart, beauty is of all things what least calls
for explanation. For matter and space and time and
principles of reason and of evolution, all are ultimately
brute, unaccountable data. We may describe what
actually is, but it might have been otherwise, and the
mystery of its being is as baffling and dark as ever.

But we, the minds that ask all questions and judge
of the validity of all answers, we are not ourselves inde
pendent of this world in which we live. We sprang from
it, and our relations in it determine all our instincts and
satisfactions. This final questioning and sense of mystery

286 LITTLE ESSAYS

is an unsatisfied craving which nature has her way of stilling.
We ask for reasons only when we are surprised. If we
had no expectations we should have no surprises. If our
spontaneous thoughts came to run in harmony with the
course of nature, if our expectations were then continually
fulfilled, the sense of mystery would vanish. We should
be incapable of asking why the world existed or had such
a nature, just as we are now little inclined to ask why
anything is right, but mightily disinclined to give up asking
why anything is wrong.

This satisfaction of our reason, due to the harmony
between our nature and our experience, is partially realized
already. The sense of beauty is its realization. When
our senses and imagination find what they crave, when
the world so shapes itself or so moulds the mind that the
correspondence between them is perfect, then perception
is pleasure, and existence needs no apology. A grateful
environment is a substitute for happiness. The reason
and the heart remain deeply unsatisfied. But the eye
finds in nature, and in some supreme achievements of art,
constant and fuller satisfaction. For the eye is quick,
and seems to have been more docile to the education of
life than the heart or the reason of man, and able sooner
to adapt itself to the reality. Beauty therefore seems to
be the clearest manifestation of perfection, and the best
evidence of its possibility. If perfection is, as it should
be, the ultimate justification of being, we may understand
the ground of the moral dignity of beauty. Beauty is a
pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and
nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the prevalence
of the good.

NOTE

THE passages from Mr. Santayana s works are from the following:

The Sense of Beauty. New York. Charles Scribner s Sons. 1896.

London. Constable & Co. (S. of B.)

Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. New York. Charles
Scribner s Sons. 1900. London. Constable & Co. (P.R.)
Fhe Life of Reason, or the Phases of Human Progress. New York.
Charles Scribner s Sons. 1905. London. Constable & Co.
I. Introduction and Reason in Common Sense. (R. i.)
II. Reason in Society. (R. n.)

III. Reason in Religion. (R. in.)

IV. Reason in Art. (R. iv.)
V. Reason in Science. (R. v.)

Three Philosophical Poets. Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe. Cam
bridge, Harvard University. London. Humphrey Milford.
1910. (Three Poets.)

Spinoza s Ethics and " De Intellectus Emendatione." Translated by
A. Boyle, with Introduction by Professor G. Santayana.
London. J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd. 1910. Everyman s
Library. (Spinoza.)

Winds of Doctrine. Studies in Contemporary Opinion. London.
J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd. 1913. (Winds.)

Egotism in German Philosophy. London. J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd.
1916. (Egotism.)

1. Spirit the Judge. 5. of B. pp. 3-4.

2. The Origin of Morals, (i) Spinoza, p. xv; (2) R. iv. p. 208;

(3) P.R. iv. pp. 28-9.

3. Ideals, (i) R. v. p. 209 ; (2) Three Poets, p. 98 ; (3) P.R. p. 246,

4. Intellectual Ambition. P.R. pp. 1-3.

5. The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men. R. I. pp. 5-52.

6. The Birth of Reason. R. I. pp. 40, 44, 42, 45-7.

7. The Difference Reason makes. R. i. pp. 59, 57-8, 53-4, 60.

8. Body and Mind. R. i. pp. 205-13.

9. The Self. R. iv. pp. 8-10.

10. Self-Consciousness, Vanity, and Fame. R. n. pp. 140-46.

11. False Moral Perspectives. R. i. pp. 248-51, 253-5, 252.

12. Pain. R. i. pp. 224-5.

13. What People will put up with. P.R. p. 242.

287

288 LITTLE ESSAYS

14. Advantages of a Long Childhood. R. n. pp. 37, 36.

15. The Transitive Force of Knowledge. R. I. pp. 78, 81, 130.

16. Knowledge of Nature is Symbolic, (i) R. n. pp. 201-4 ( 2 )

Egotism, p. 6 ; (3) Winds, pp. 183-4.

17. Relativity of Science. R. v. pp. 307-9.

18. Mathematics and Morals. R. v. pp. 194-5.

19. Mind-Reading. R. i. pp. 152-4, 149-50, 175-6.

20. Knowledge of Character. R. i. pp. 155-8.

21. Comradeship. R. n. pp. 147-9.

22. Love. R. u. pp. 26-34.

23. Imaginative Nature of Religion, (i) R. in. pp. 3-6; (2) R. i

pp. 12 1-3 ; (3) R. m. p. 52 ; (4) Egotism, pp. 154-5.

24. Prosaic Misunderstandings. P.R. pp. v-ix.

25. The Haste to Believe, (i) R. in. p. 131 ; (2) R. in. p. 24.

26. Pathetic Notions of God. (i) R. in. p. 34; (2) R. iv. p. 175;

(3) P.R. p. 47.

27. Greek Religion. Three Poets, pp. 63-4.

28. Original Christian Faith. Winds, pp. 33-8.

29. The Convert. P.R. pp. 85-6, 285, 88.

30. Christian Doctrine a Moral Allegory. P.R. pp. 90-98.

31. The Christian Epic. R. in. pp. 89-98.

32. Pagan Custom infused into Christianity. R. in. 99-104.

33. Christ and the Virgin. 5. of B. pp. 189-91.

34. Orthodoxy and Heresy. P.R. pp. 57, 113-17.

35. Protestantism, (i) R. m. pp. 115-18; (2) P.R. 112-13; (3)

R. in. pp. 125-6 ; (4) R. i. pp. n-12.

36. Piety. R. in. pp. 179, 184-5, 189-92.

37. Spirituality. R. m. pp. 193-5.

38. Prayer. R. m. pp. 44-8.

39. The Fear of Death. Three Poets, pp. 51-4.

40. Psychic Phenomena. R. in. pp. 232-4.

41. A Future Life. R. in. pp. 243-7.

42. Disinterested Interest in Life, (i) Three Poets, pp. 54-6;

(2) R. m. pp. 254-5.

43. Platonic Love. P.R. pp. 137-41.

44. Ideal Immortality, (i) R .in. pp. 260-67, 268-73; (2) Spinoza,

pp. xviii-xix.

45. Justification of Art. R. iv. pp. 166-74.

46. The Place of Art in Moral Economy. R. iv. pp. 181-4, I 77 ^-

47. Rareness of ^Esthetic Feeling. R. iv. pp. 193-5.

48. Art and Happiness. R. iv. pp. 222-3.

49. Utility and Beauty. 5. of B. pp. 215-21.

50. Glimpses of Perfection. 5. of B. pp. 260-62.

51. Mere Art. R. iv. pp. 211-12.

52. Costliness. S. of B. pp. 211-14.

53. The Stars. S. of B. pp. 100-106.

54. Music, (i) S. of B. pp. 69-70; (2) R. iv. pp. 45-9, 52-6;

(3) Egotism, p. 161 ; (4) R. iv. pp. 56-60.

55. The Essence of Literature. R. iv. pp. 82-4.

56. The Need of Poetry. P.R. pp. 268-70.

NOTE 289

57. Poetry and Philosophy. Three Poets, pp. 8, 10-14, 123-4, I 4 2 -

58. The Elements of Poetry. P.R. pp. 258-63.

59. Poetry and Prose. R. iv. pp. 99-104.

60. Primary Poetry. R. iv. pp. 87-94, 201-2.

61. The Supreme Poet. Three Poets, pp. 212-15.

62. Against Prying Biographers. Three Poets, p. 20.

63. The Dearth of Great Men. (i) Winds, pp. 20-22, 109 ; (2) R. i.

pp. 9-10.

64. The Intellect out of Fashion. Winds, pp. 17-20, 23-4.

65. Essence and Existence. R. i. pp. 180-82, 171-2.

66. Malicious Psychology. R. i. pp. 84-6.

67. On " Esse est percipi." R. i. pp. 112-14.

68. Kant, (i) Egotism, pp. 54-60 ; (2) R. i. pp. 94-7.

69. Transcendentalism, (i) R. v. p. 312; (2) R. i. pp. 29-30;

(3) P.R. pp. 219-20; (4) .R. i. pp. 219-20; (5) P.R. p. 248;
(6) Egotism, pp. 167-8.

70. Precarious Rationalisms. R. i. pp. 198-202.

71. Unjust Judgments, (i) R. I. pp. 106, 108-9 , (-} Egotism, p. 116

(3) R. ii. p. 61 ; (4) R. i. p. 222.

72. Modern Poetry. P.R. pp. 166-70.

73. The Unhappiness of Artists. S. of B. pp. 63-5.

74. Poetry of Latin Peoples. P.R. pp. 131-2.

75. Dante. Three Poets, pp. 132-5.

76. Absence of Religion in Shakespeare. P.R. pp. 153-6.

77. Romantic Ignorance of Self, (i) P.R. p. 185; (2) Egotism,

p. 137 ; (3) R. ii. p. 193.

78. The Barbarian. R. i. pp. 262, 231-3.

79. Romanticism. Three Poets, pp. 143-8, 196-9.

80. The Politics of Faust. Three Poets, pp. 181-5.

81. Emerson, (i) P.R. pp. 231-3 ; (2) Winds, pp. 197-200.

82. Shelley. Winds, pp. 158-60.

83. Browning. P.R. pp. 192-4, 199-207.

84. Nietzsche. Egotism, pp. 127, 134-5.

85. Intrinsic Values. Egotism, pp. 109-11.

86. Heathenism. Egotism, pp. 144-9.

87. Moral Neutrality of Materialism. Three Poets, pp. 32-4.

88. Value Irrational. S. of B. pp. 16-20.

89. Emotions of the Materialist, (i) R. v. pp. 89-94 ( 2 ) Spinoza,

p. viii.

90. Sadness of Naturalism, (i) R. i. pp. 189-93; (2) P.R. p. 21;

(3) R. iv. p. 169; (4) Three Poets, pp. 210-11.

91. Happiness in Disillusion. P.R. pp. 249-50; R. II. p. 195-

92. The True Place of Materialism, (i) Three Poets, p. 27 ; (2) R. i.

pp. 16-17 ; (3) Egotism, p. 70.

93. Intuitive Morality. R. v. pp. 218-23.

94. Relativity of Values, (i) Winds, pp. 151-2; (2) 5. of B. pp.

41-2; (3) R. i. p. 32.

95. Authority of Reason in Morals. R. v. pp. 231-2, 249-50, 244-5,

248, 266-8.

96. Pleasures Ingenuous, (i) S. of B. p. 39 ; (2) R. iv. pp. 168-9.

290 LITTLE ESSAYS

97. The Lower Senses. S. of 13. pp. 66-8.

98. Pleasure and Conscience. S. of B. pp. 23-5.

99. The Worth of Pleasures and Pains. R. i. pp. 236-9, 55-6.

100. The Voluptuary and the Worldling. R. in. pp. 200-204, 210.

101. Moral War. R. v. pp. 233-8.

102. Origin of Tyranny. R. n. pp. 70-72, 80, 79.

103. War. R. n. pp. 81-5.

104. Patriotism, (i) R. in. pp. 186-7; ( 2 ) R- u - PP- I 7 I 4I (3)

Winds, p. 6.

105. Industrial Idealism, (i) R. iv. p. 21 ; (2) 7?. n. pp. 67-8.

106. Collectivism. R. n. pp. 133-4, 5 2 3-

107. Christian Morality. R. V. pp. 281-6.

108. Supernaturalism. R. v. pp. 290-91, 297-300.

109. Post-Rational Morality. R. v. pp. 266-8.
no. The Need of Discipline. R. iv. pp. 188-90.

in. Happiness, (i) R. v. pp. 251-3 ; (2) R. i. p. 30 ; (3) Egotism,
pp. 152-3.

112. Detachment. S. of B. pp. 241-2, 244-5.

113. The Profit of Living, (i) 5. of B. pp. 29-31 ; (2) P.R. p. 101;

(3) R. I. pp. 229-30 ; (4) 5. of B. pp. 263-4.

114. Beauty a Hint of Happiness. S. oj B. pp. 267-70.

THE END

PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE
CARDS OR SLIPS FROM THIS POCKET

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY